OpenAI's new training program, Excel becomes a reasoning tool, and Claude learns by watching your screen

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OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Small Business this week, a program offering educational resources, live training events and practical guidance aimed specifically at helping small business owners adopt AI more effectively, following a similar outreach effort Anthropic launched earlier this year targeting the same audience of roughly 34 million small businesses. Separately, Microsoft Excel Vice President Brian Jones confirmed the company's long term vision is turning Excel into a reasoning platform, where Copilot increasingly answers plain language questions like why did sales decline last month directly, rather than requiring users to master formulas or pivot tables themselves

Intuit launched a new Business Credit Card integrated directly with QuickBooks, giving real time visibility into spending and cash flow with purchases automatically appearing in the books without manual entry. Anthropic's Claude Cowork also gained a new Record a Skill feature, letting users teach Claude a repetitive workflow simply by screen recording themselves completing it once and narrating their reasoning aloud, which Claude then converts into a reusable skill for tasks like weekly reports or customer onboarding, best suited to predictable, repeatable work rather than anything requiring frequent judgment calls

The broader theme tying these announcements together is what one columnist called businesses needing to prepare for the agentic web, where AI agents browsing on a person's behalf increasingly research products, compare vendors and complete purchases automatically. That shift means small business websites built purely for human visitors may need real redesign work to make information easy for an AI agent to interpret and act on, with the argument being that within five years a website's single most important visitor may not be a human being at all

New ChatGPT Training For Small Businesses And Other Technology News This Week For Your Businesswww.forbes.com