On 6 October Anthropic put Claude inside Google Sheets, Docs and Slides as a beta for every paid Claude plan. It reads the file you have open and only that file, it writes formulas and builds models on the sheet in front of you, and by default it asks before it changes anything. For the many businesses here that run on Google Workspace, this is the most useful tool launch since this column began, and the most important setting is the one you should never switch off.

OpenAI’s new 'Dots' work around the clock on their own computer, and here is what a business should and should not hand one

Claude is testing it, ChatGPT already does it, and here is what to decide before it reaches you

The people building it just asked for a slowdown, and what your business should do with that

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 on 1 September and OpenAI followed with GPT-6 Astra two days later. Both are described by their makers as the most capable models they have built. Neither claim tells you whether your month-end gets better. Here is a two-hour test that does, and a note on what each launch actually gives a business paying US$20 a month, which is less than the headlines suggest.

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week, the order of operations. Most small businesses automate the part customers can see and leave the part the money runs through untouched, which is roughly backwards. Here is how to choose the first process, and the unglamorous data work that decides whether any of it holds.

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week, what it costs. ChatGPT is now carrying advertising in a growing list of countries, on the free plan and on the cheapest paid one. Jamaica is not on that list yet, but the direction is settled, and it is a good moment to work out which plan your business is actually on

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week, the other side of the table: researchers used an AI assistant sitting inside a hacked mailbox to map a company, impersonate its chief executive, find a US$247,500 wire transfer waiting for approval, and redirect it. The controls that stop this cost nothing

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week, a change announced just days ago: Claude now embeds an invisible watermark in the text it generates, which means AI-assisted work is becoming identifiable — and the businesses with nothing to adjust are the ones that never pretended otherwise.

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week, the other side of the ledger: how these tools fail, where your data goes when you press send, and the short list of things that should never be pasted into a chat window.

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week: due diligence for the rest of us — the leases, loan letters, and business purchases that arrive as a mountain of PDF, and how AI helps you read every page before the deadline does.

Every week this column shows what AI can do for a finance team. This week it answers the question readers ask most, usually with a price page already open: which one should a small Jamaican office actually pay for?

Every month you type the same long instructions into a chat window and attach the same files. This week you write those instructions once, attach the files once, and hand the whole routine to an agent your team can share.

The books close on Tuesday; the board deck used to take until Friday. Claude now works inside both Excel and PowerPoint — and because the two add-ins share one conversation, this month’s numbers flow from the workbook into the deck without a single copy-paste.

The drawer of crumpled receipts is a Jamaican small-business rite of passage. Point Claude’s new desktop app at a folder of hundreds of receipts and bank exports, describe the mess in plain English, and it reads, sorts, and tidies the whole pile in place — so you keep the judgement and lose the lost weekend.