Anthropic Just Told You How AI Works at Your Business
The Harness Manifesto, Part 3. Routines shipped. Conway is next. Here's what both mean if you run a small business — no engineering background required.
Two weeks ago, Anthropic quietly shipped a feature called Routines. A
few weeks before that, somebody inside the company leaked the feature
that’s coming after it, codenamed Conway. Put them together and you get
a clear picture of how the AI most of us are starting to use at work is
going to actually fit into a small business.
I’m going to translate both, and then tell you what they mean for
you, because most of what’s been written about them is for engineers and
you don’t need to be an engineer to benefit from this.
The short version
Until now, when you wanted AI to help you with something at work, the
model was “you open a chat window and ask it.” That’s Claude, ChatGPT,
Cowork, Gemini, whatever. You type. The AI types back. Work happens.
That’s about to stop being the only way.
Routines is the first step: you can now set up AI to do a job on a
schedule, or whenever a specific thing happens in your business, without
anyone opening a chat window. “Every Monday morning, pull last week’s
orders and send me the three weirdest ones.” “Every time a new customer
signs up, read their website and write me a one-paragraph profile.” The
AI just does it. Nobody had to be sitting there.
Conway, which hasn’t shipped yet, goes further. It’s an AI that sits
quietly alongside your other work, always on, watching. It can drive a
web browser on your behalf, step into a job when it sees something that
needs attention, and stay in a conversation across hours or days. Think
“AI coworker who doesn’t go home at 5pm,” with all the good and weird
implications that has.
If you run or work at a small business, that’s the shift. AI stops
being a chat window you have to remember to open and becomes a thing
that works in the background the way your automatic bill pay or your
email spam filter does. You set it up once. It does its job. You check
in on it.
Why this matters this
week, not in a year
The usual story about AI tools goes: something huge gets announced,
the news cycle runs for a week, people argue about it, nothing changes
at your business for another year. This one is different for a specific
reason.
Routines is real. It’s live. It runs in Anthropic’s cloud, not yours.
You don’t have to install anything, you don’t have to hire a developer,
you don’t have to pay a separate software bill. It draws from a Claude
subscription you might already have.
If you’ve ever said out loud “I wish AI could just do this thing for
me without my having to be here,” the gap between that wish and reality
got much smaller two weeks ago, and most people running small businesses
still have no idea.
Conway hasn’t shipped, but the direction is set. Someone at Anthropic
cares enough about “AI that lives in the world” as a product category
that they’re building two products in that shape at once. That’s worth
noticing, even if you don’t adopt anything yet.
What you can
actually do with Routines right now
I want to translate this into concrete examples, because “scheduled
AI” is vague and most people skip over it.
A bookkeeper I know spends an hour every Friday afternoon pulling
weekly financial summaries for her biggest clients. She copies from
QuickBooks, pastes into a template, writes a short narrative. With
Routines, she could set up a Routine that runs every Friday at 2pm,
reads from QuickBooks via a connector, writes a draft of each client
summary in her voice, and drops the drafts into a folder. She reviews
and sends. An hour of work becomes fifteen minutes of review.
A contractor who sends project updates to homeowners at the end of
every workday could have a Routine that runs at 5pm, reads the notes he
typed on each jobsite, writes a short update email per homeowner in his
tone, and queues them as drafts for him to approve and send.
A small agency that qualifies inbound leads could set up a Routine
that fires whenever a new lead submits the website form, crawls the
lead’s website, writes a short profile with the likely fit assessment,
and posts it into Slack before the salesperson has even seen the
inquiry.
None of these require you to know what a cron job is. You describe
the work in plain English. You connect the tools Claude needs to do the
job, which for most small businesses is things like email, Google Drive,
Slack, maybe a CRM. Claude figures out the rest.
The thing to notice in all three examples: the AI isn’t replacing the
business owner’s judgment. It’s doing the setup work so the judgment
happens faster. The bookkeeper still sends. The contractor still
approves. The agency still makes the call. But the first ninety percent
of the work that used to consume their week is now running on its
own.
What Conway probably
does, when it arrives
Conway is reportedly the always-on version of the same idea. Instead
of scheduled work or event-triggered work, Conway sits alongside you,
watching the browser, watching your messages, watching whatever you let
it watch, and stepping in when it sees something.
Imagine it this way. A salesperson keeps having the same conversation
with prospects about pricing. The second their pricing page gets
updated, Conway notices, reads the changes, and proactively writes a
note: “Three of your deals in progress quoted the old price. Do you want
me to draft updated versions?” The salesperson didn’t ask for that.
Conway caught it because it was watching.
Or: a store owner is getting a run of complaints about shipping
delays on a specific product. Conway notices the pattern across support
tickets, flags it before the owner notices, and offers to write a
proactive email to anyone who bought that product recently.
This is the category of work that never gets done at a small business
because nobody has time to stitch the signal together. A human employee
would do some of this if they had twenty percent more capacity. They
don’t. An always-on AI assistant is the category of help that was never
affordable before.
Conway isn’t out yet. It’s still in internal testing. What’s worth
knowing now is that an always-on AI assistant is a real product category
that a major vendor is building toward. When it ships, what it replaces
at a small business isn’t a specific task. It’s the “we know we should
be doing this but we never get around to it” list.
The one warning that
actually matters
Every AI feature comes with limits, and I want to flag the one that’s
likeliest to bite a small business.
Routines runs on your Claude subscription. If you’re planning to run
a lot of them, especially ones that do real work for customers, the
usage caps on a Pro seat are not built for it. The architecture that
survives scale is a Team or Enterprise plan sized for the workload, or
splitting the work across seats with clear ownership.
Not a crisis. Just the kind of thing that bites you the first time a
Routine starts silently missing runs at month-end and you have to figure
out why.
Same goes for Conway when it arrives. Persistent AI that’s running
all the time is categorically more expensive than a scheduled run that
fires and ends. Price that in before you wire your whole business to
it.
What to do about any of this
If you’re running a small business, here’s the practical answer.
You don’t need to do anything today. Nothing is broken. Your existing
setup still works.
But if you’re already paying for Claude, or ChatGPT, or any AI tool,
and you’ve ever said “I wish this could just happen automatically,” you
now have a much better place to put that wish than you did a month ago.
The week you try Routines on a real recurring task at your business is
the week you stop thinking of AI as something you talk to and start
thinking of it as something you deploy.
The bottom of that list, Conway-shaped work, is the thing most small
businesses will eventually run. The top of that list, Routines-shaped
work, is available right now.
The businesses that pull ahead over the next year aren’t the ones
that have the most exotic AI strategy. They’re the ones that picked
three or four recurring jobs that used to eat their week and quietly put
AI on autopilot for each one.
This is where that starts.
Richard Vaughn writes about AI systems for small and medium-sized
businesses. His company Robot Friends builds AI systems for SMBs and
offers 1-on-1 coaching for business leaders and teams learning to work
with AI as a daily driver, structured around real work instead of
lectures. You can find the bottom-up view on the future of work here,
and the services page at robobffs.com/services