Tools are no longer used directly, but invoked in the background by Claude
Anthropic’s Claude AI can now create and edit common file formats: Excel, documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs… without leaving the web experience or desktop application.
How far can AI go? Until now, Claude could only provide text responses and artifacts integrated into the application, but it could not create or edit files. Today, Anthropic announces a new feature for Claude that allows it to create and edit common file formats, including Excel spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDF files, without leaving the Claude.ai web experience or desktop application.
Claude now has access to a private computing environment that it will use to write and execute code to create files and analyses. This new file creation feature is currently being rolled out in preview for Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise plan users. Claude Pro users will also benefit from this new feature in the coming weeks.
Office automation, a simple layer of service
This evolution redefines the very nature of productivity software, now relegated to the status of silent commodities. Tools are no longer used directly, but invoked in the background by agents. The user no longer “makes” a document: they request it. And this request is interpreted, executed, and formatted by AI according to implicit rules. Office automation is becoming a service layer, invisible, orchestrated by intention.
This is clearly a paradigm shift. For a long time, office suite publishers dictated the standards for interface, compatibility, design, and usage. Microsoft led the way. Today, it is the agent that captures the end user’s attention and reformulates their needs into software actions. Claude, ChatGPT, Mistral, and Copilot are becoming the real project managers, controlling Word or Excel as one would call a microservice.
