Opened Outlook this morning. 74 unread. A proposal I sent three weeks ago still waiting on a response. Same week Anthropic decided to give everyone free access to their Outlook data inside Claude. Timing is funny sometimes
Co-pilot costs £24/user. Claude just made this free.
On 6 April, Anthropic opened its Microsoft 365 connector to every Claude plan, including the free one. You can now connect Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint to Claude and actually ask it things about your own emails and documents. Not generic things. Yours.
Microsoft's Copilot does something similar. It costs £24 per user per month, on top of your existing M365 subscription. Claude's version costs nothing extra if you're already on the free plan. That's the whole story, really.
For UK SMBs sitting on years of Outlook history, this is genuinely useful. Tell Claude to find every email thread where a specific client raised a complaint. Ask it to summarise last quarter's proposal conversations before you get on a call. Use it to pull context before a meeting instead of scrolling for ten minutes like an animal.
The integration is read-only for now — Claude can't send emails or book meetings on your behalf. And setup does need admin approval through Microsoft Entra. But for most businesses on Microsoft 365, that's a five-minute job, not a project.
Your readiness workshop won't read your emails
The AI readiness consulting market is having a moment. Workshops, maturity audits, five-stage roadmaps. All of it, presumably, to help you figure out whether you're ready for AI.
Meanwhile, Claude just connected to the inbox your business has been running on for fifteen years. No consultant needed. No readiness score required. You go to claude.ai/customize/connectors, click Microsoft 365, authenticate, done.
The readiness industry answers a question nobody should be asking. The question isn't whether you're ready. It's which inbox, spreadsheet, or process you're going to start with today. Everything else is delay with a slide deck attached.
Tool Round-up
Three things to connect this week
All free or near-free. No dev work. No agency.
Claude + Microsoft 365 — Connect Outlook, Teams, OneDrive. Ask Claude about your actual email history. Go to claude.ai/customize/connectors. Needs admin auth via Microsoft Entra but takes minutes. More here.
Claude Memory (now free) — Available on every plan since March 2, including free. Claude now remembers your business context across sessions. Stop pasting the same company background into every prompt. Enable it in settings, let it build for 24 hours, you're done.
Claude for Excel (updated) — The Excel and PowerPoint add-ins now share full conversation context. What you discussed in your Excel session carries into PowerPoint and vice versa. Useful if you're building reports from data and need the deck to match.
From the timeline
The M365 connector news landed with a thud this week. People noticed the pricing gap immediately.
Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Anthropic just plugged Claude into Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams on every plan. Including Free.
Microsoft charges $30/user/month for Copilot to do the same thing inside the same apps.
Read that again. Anthropic is offering access to your M365 data through Claude for… https://t.co/pjkKCtNvYn
Aakash Gupta's side-by-side: Claude reads your Outlook free, Copilot charges £24/user for the same access. The maths speaks for itself.
Claude@claudeai
Microsoft 365 connectors are now available on every Claude plan.
Connect Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint to bring your email, docs, and files into the conversation.
Get started here: https://t.co/EdoQeT8BBN pic.twitter.com/sOrigP41FJ
The official announcement. Short, factual, no fanfare — which somehow makes the Copilot comparison even louder.
Stop re-explaining your business every Monday
You know the routine. New Claude chat. Paste in your company background. Explain your tone of voice. Remind it who your customers are. Twenty minutes gone before you've done anything useful.
Claude's memory feature fixes this. It's been free for every user since March 2 and it works exactly how it sounds: Claude reads your past conversations, builds a profile of your business context, and carries that forward. You don't have to tell it you're a B2B services firm based in Leeds every single time.
To set it up, go to Claude settings, find Memory, and turn it on. Give it 24 hours to process your history. From then on, open a new chat and it already knows the basics.
One practical thing: keep your work conversations in a Project (Claude's project folders), separate from personal chats. Memory synthesises from standalone conversations only, so a bit of organisation upfront saves confusion later. It won't replace a well-crafted system prompt for complex tasks, but for everyday queries it removes a genuinely annoying friction point.
Asked Claude to write this sign-off. It suggested something about 'exciting times ahead'. Deleted it. Wrote this instead.
Need a hand implementing any of it? Just reply to this email saying "Help" or "Implement" and we'll sort it for you.
Till next time.
Dan
