AI is still waiting for its VisiCalc moment | usagoldmines.com

The arrival of Claude for Small Business earlier this week marked an interesting moment–and a savvy strategic move–for Anthropic.

Rather than saddling web browsers with more AI slop or trying to slather AI onto perfectly good user interfaces that don’t need improving, Anthropic is attempting something both less flashy and potentially more fruitful: finding a practical, agentic AI-powered application for everyday business owners looking to make ends meet.

The bag of tricks included in Claude for Small Business is somewhat predictable, running the gamut from “ready-to-run” agentic workflows to connectors for PayPal, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, and more. With these tools, business owners can use Claude to help to plan their payrolls, reconcile their books, analyze their cash flow, spin up promotional campaigns, and so forth. 

That’s all well and good, but it also entails trusting Claude to perform those bookkeeping and promotional duties accurately and thoughtfully. I’m guessing many small business owners will (quite rightly) balk at the prospect of handing their tried-and-true workflows to an unpredictable AI model, even one as powerful as Claude.

Small business users were equally hesitant about computers in general at the dawn of the PC age. Sure, an Apple II or a Commodore 64 could balance checkbooks and track inventories, but not much better (or faster) than a human could. Why bother coughing up $1,500 (in unadjusted 1979 dollars) for an Apple II that wasn’t much better at bookkeeping than a person with an old-school ledger?

Then as now, what was missing was a killer app–a game-changing application that takes a familiar task and transmutes it into something simple, elegant, and (in retrospect) seemingly inevitable. What could that killer app be?

Back in 1979, the answer was VisiCalc, the very first computer spreadsheet. It was a brilliant tool that perfectly leveraged the power of the Apple II (and later many other PC platforms). All of a sudden, small business owners weren’t just tracking their expenses and revenue–they were forecasting them, all by changing a single number in a cell. Thanks to VisiCalc (which was later eclipsed by Lotus 1-2-3, and then later Microsoft Excel), the $1,500 price tag for an Apple II looked like a bargain. 

I’d argue that we’re at a similar pre-VisiCalc moment with AI. Yes, I know, Claude Code is a killer app, but it’s only killer for a narrow slice of users. For the rest of us, AI remains an imperfect fit, like (if I can recycle a metaphor) trying to use a socket wrench to slice a wedding cake.

With Claude for Small Business and Claude Cowork, Anthropic is nibbling around the edges of what VisiCalc accomplished: finding a truly useful and unique application for AI that offers tangible value to small business owners–and, by extension, to everyday users everywhere. 

But trying to shoehorn the agentic AI abilities of Claude Code into the world of small business is, I would argue, a dead end. What makes AI terrific at crafting code–its endless creativity–is what makes it so worrisome when it comes to business. Yes, AI can build meticulously crafted spreadsheets and beautifully crafted bar charts in seconds, but they’re useless if you can’t trust the data behind them.

The key is harnessing AI’s power in a different way, applying its strengths to the right applications while turning its flaws (especially its runaway creativity) into virtues. 

In short, AI needs a VisiCalc–a killer app that transforms ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini from slot machines (or slop dispensers) into truly useful tools, ones that make the lives of everyday users–not just coders–tangibly better.

All we have to do is find it. Easy, right?

More in AI this week

• Google wants to use AI to transform one of the oldest user interfaces in computing: the mouse pointer. Color me skeptical.
• A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was roundly booed after calling AI “the next industrial revolution.” Take note, Sam Altman.
• One reason AI sucks at voice chat is that it can’t talk and listen at the same time, but there’s a new AI startup that thinks it’s cracked the code.
• What’s up with Claude blackmailing people all the time? There’s actually a good reason for Claude’s simulated criminal behavior.
• Google I/O is next Tuesday, and there’s mounting evidence it will unveil an “always-on” AI assistant named “Spark” to triage your inbox.
• Ever been duped by an AI customer service bot? I was, and I’m still steamed about it.

Prompt of the week: The 80/20 Prompt

Need to learn something fast? With the right prompt, you can get a focused crash course in just about anything from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The trick: using the 80/20 prompt, derived from a decades-old “Pareto principle” that 80 percent of outcomes are decided by 20 percent of causes. 

In this case, we’ll be asking the AI to cull the most important 20 percent of any given concept that will yield 80 percent of what you need to know about it. The 80/20 prompt won’t make you an expert in subatomic particles, but it’ll give you enough information to hold your own at cocktail parties.

That’s all for now! 

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