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ZDNET Highlights
- Anthropic’s cloud chatbot just got a suite of finance updates.
- The cloud can draft financial reports, access new data, and more.
- AI is playing an increasingly central role in the financial sector.
Anthropic is accelerating its efforts to attract new clients in the finance sector with a suite of upgrades to the cloud, including integration with Microsoft Excel, seven new market data connectors, and six new agent skills.
The upgrade comes at a time when Anthropic is leaning more heavily into its partnership with Microsoft, and when the finance sector is being reshaped by the ongoing rise of generative AI tools. Here’s what’s new and what each upgrade can do.
excel integration
Anthropic announced on Monday that the cloud can now be integrated directly with Microsoft Excel, allowing users to interact with it through a sidebar that appears over an open spreadsheet (like Clippy – RIP – just a little smarter). For example, users can ask the chatbot to answer questions about spreadsheet data, modify them while preserving the overall structure, or create entirely new spreadsheets.
Also: AWS says AI will boost the value of human creativity in financial services
The Excel integration builds on a partnership between Anthropic and Microsoft that was first reported last month. Microsoft has since embedded Anthropic’s AI models into its Microsoft 365 suite and its CoPilot AI assistant.
Cloud for Excel is now available as a preview for paid users of Anthropic’s Max, Enterprise, and Teams subscription tiers.
Connect to global market intelligence
The cloud now comes with seven new connectors, each of which directly connects the chatbot to financial services platforms, allowing it to pull data from them in real time.
Also: AI just passed a brutal finance test most humans fail – should analysts be worried?
For example, a connector with financial research platform Aera gives the cloud access to transcripts of company earnings calls, summaries of investor meetings and other important financial documents. Financial news website MT Newswire along with another website keeps the chatbot updated with the latest market news. Google had announced a similar update in August, adding a chatbot and live market updates to its finance platform.
Other connectors link to credit reporting agency Moody’s, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), cloud security platform Egnite, portfolio monitoring software company Chronograph and global investment research firm Third Bridge (via the Aera Connector).
The new connectors are now available to all cloud users.
New finance-forward skills
In addition to being able to pull real-time data through seven new connectors, the cloud also now has six new finance skills. The company introduced Agent Skills — or simply “skills” — for the cloud earlier this month. These are customizable folders of preset instructions that shape the cloud’s performance on a given task, such as drafting a document that aligns with the company’s brand voice. They’re designed to make chatbots more personalized and useful: less as a general assistant, more as a digital employee who understands the policies and procedures of a particular business.
Also: How AI can help manage your finances (and what to consider)
Six new skills share that goal with a focus on financial research. The new Earnings Analysis skill, for example, takes a company’s quarterly transcripts and financial data and turns them into digestible reports, including executives’ statements and strategic recommendations. Other skills include analyzing comparable companies, modeling discounted cash flows, processing data room documents, preparing company profiles for pitchbooks and buyer lists, and generating reports covering companies’ financial performance.
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Like the Excel integration, Skills are now available as a research preview to paid users of Anthropic’s Max, Enterprise, and Teams subscription tiers.
AI and finance
Algorithms have long been used on Wall Street and throughout the financial sector to analyze and predict complex market trends. But the use of AI has been increasing in recent years with the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Cloud, which are trained to detect subtle mathematical patterns in vast stores of data.
A study published last month found that some industry-leading AI models were able to pass the Chartered Financial Analyst Level III exam, widely seen as the finance sector’s toughest qualifying exam, suggesting that such tools may soon take over some of the more routine aspects of roles like financial planning and portfolio management.
Also: Fighting AI with AI, finance firms prevent $5M fraud – but at what cost?
Meanwhile, generic AI deepfakes and other forms of scammercraft have created new opportunities for financial fraudsters – as well as new possibilities for financial companies to protect themselves from such attacks.
