What Is Claude? An AI Built by Anthropic for Business Use
Claude is a large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic in the United States. As of April 2026 it ships in three model lines—Sonnet, Opus, and Haiku—so you can pick the right tradeoff between use case and cost. It is widely regarded as strong at producing natural Japanese and at processing long documents, and adoption is growing among Japanese companies for tasks like business writing, internal-document summarization, and code review.
In Mihata's day-to-day SME AI support, we have seen a clear rise in companies switching from ChatGPT to Claude, or running both side by side. This article covers how to use Claude—from the basics through use cases that move the needle in business—plus a set of copy-paste prompts, all based on April 2026 information.
Three Strengths of Claude
Three strengths matter most for business use. First, a long context window: you can feed it long PDFs, meeting minutes, or contracts in their entirety and the model keeps the full context in mind. Second, natural Japanese: it reliably produces honorific and formal business writing.
Third, collaboration features such as Artifacts and Projects: you can edit generated content in a side pane while continuing the conversation, which fits real workflows. We revisit how this stacks up against ChatGPT in a later section.
Main Plans as of April 2026
Claude offers a graduated set of plans from a personal free tier up to enterprise. For serious business use, Pro or above is the realistic floor.
Plan | Audience | Highlights |
|---|
Free | Trial use | Capped usage and features |
Pro | Individual professionals | Higher quotas, Projects available |
Team | Small teams of 5+ | Shared use, admin features |
Enterprise | Large organizations | SSO, audit logs, stronger data protection |
Pricing and token limits may change. Always confirm the latest terms on Anthropic's official site before signing up.
How to Get Started: From Account Creation to First Use
Getting Claude up and running for work is straightforward. The thing that pays off most is setting internal rules and a data-handling policy at the very start—it dramatically reduces operational issues later.
Sign-Up and Initial Setup
Go to Anthropic's official site and sign up with an email address or Google account. For business adoption, starting from a shared AI-team account or a Team-plan admin account—rather than a personal one—makes governance much easier.
In the initial setup, always enable two-factor authentication and enforce password-manager use. Same baseline as your other SaaS, but particularly important here because AI tools handle confidential information more often.
Layout and Basic Operations
The Claude UI is simple: thread list on the left, chat in the middle, Artifacts and project info on the right. Drag-and-drop accepts PDFs, images, and spreadsheets directly—no need to convert to text first.
The Projects feature lets you collect related materials, custom instructions, and conversation history per engagement. Create a "Customer A relationship" project, drop in past communications and quotes, and you no longer need to re-explain the background every time.
How Claude Differs From ChatGPT: Not Either-Or, But How to Split the Work
"Which is better, ChatGPT or Claude?" is a frequent question, but in practice most companies use both. Each has its strengths, so the realistic frame is division of labor, not rivalry.
Strengths Compared
Aspect | Claude | ChatGPT |
|---|
Long-form processing | Strong at summarizing and analyzing long documents | Tuned for typical lengths |
Tone | Stable at polite, formal writing | Flexible across a wide range of tones |
Image generation | Not supported (text-centric) | Image generation built in |
Voice I/O | Limited | Strong voice conversation |
External integrations | Projects, MCP, etc. | GPTs and various plugins |
How to Split Work Between the Two
Anything where accuracy and readability matter—long internal-document summarization, contract review, code review, careful email drafting—plays to Claude's strengths. Image generation, voice conversation, and entertainment-style ideation are areas where ChatGPT has the edge.
At Mihata, many clients route document-heavy work to Claude and multimodal planning work to ChatGPT, paying for both. A few thousand yen per month for a clear productivity gain is an easy ROI.
Claude Use Cases That Move the Needle in Business
Five high-impact use cases we see deliver real results in SMEs. None of them require advanced AI knowledge, and you can start on the free or Pro plan.
Auto-Structuring Minutes and Making Decisions Visible
One of the easiest wins: feed Claude a transcript of a meeting recording and ask it to extract "decisions," "to-dos and owners," and "open items for next time" as a table. Output appears five minutes after the meeting ends, which removes most of the psychological burden of writing minutes.
Reviewing Contracts and Proposals
Drop in a contract PDF from a counterparty and have Claude list "clauses that may be unfavorable to us," "suggested revisions," and a "risk assessment." Even companies without an in-house legal team can run a first-pass review. The final call should always go to a lawyer, but routing through Claude for issue spotting drastically shortens the deliberation cycle.
Drafting Customer Emails
The more sensitive the email—complaint response, apology, price-change notice—the bigger the benefit. Specify the situation, the relationship, and the goal, and Claude returns text that holds the right level of respect while keeping the message crisp.
Market Research and Internal Knowledge Curation
Feed Claude several industry reports and competitor white papers, then ask for "implications for us" and "candidate next actions." Research time drops sharply. Stash the materials in a Project and you can keep asking follow-up questions later.
Copy-Paste Prompts You Can Use Today
The trick to getting strong results from Claude is to be explicit about three things: role, context, and output format. Below are three prompt templates Mihata uses in real client work. Copy them, edit the bracketed sections, and they're ready.
Prompt 1: Structuring Meeting Minutes
You are an experienced business assistant. Read the meeting transcript below and produce three things.
1. Decisions made (3-5 bullet points)
2. To-do list (table with owner, deadline, and task)
3. Open items requiring follow-up before the next meeting (bullet list)
Replace jargon with our common internal terms, and write in concise Japanese without honorifics.
[Meeting transcript]
[paste transcript here]
Prompt 2: Drafting a Polite Customer Email
You are a sales rep at a B2B company. Considering the situation below, draft an email to send to the customer.
- Recipient: A purchasing contact at customer A
- Relationship: 3+ years of ongoing business
- Purpose: [Due to rising raw-material costs, we need to ask for a 5% price increase from next month]
- Tone: Polite and direct, avoiding circumlocution
- Length: 300-400 characters
- Subject lines: Propose 3 options
At the end, list 3 likely objections from the customer and a suggested response to each.
Prompt 3: Extracting Key Issues From a Contract
You are a legal assistant familiar with B2B contract practice. Read the attached service agreement and produce the following.
1. Clauses that may be unfavorable to us (the contractor) — up to 5, with the original text quoted
2. The risk in each clause and a proposed amendment
3. Priority for lawyer review (high, medium, low) and the rationale
Where you are unsure, do not guess; explicitly write "cannot be determined from the contract."
Three Tips for Sharper Prompts
First, give Claude a role up front. A single line like "You are a specialist in X" lifts both the expertise and the consistency of the output. Second, specify the output format concretely—table, bullets, length—so the result is easy to use downstream.
Third, tell it to flag uncertainty ("if unsure, say so"). Claude is comparatively well-behaved on hallucinations, but not perfect. Operate with the assumption that a human always does the final check.
Governance and Security for Business Adoption
What needs to be careful at the personal level and what needs to be careful at the company level are different things. To run Claude in production, you need internal rules and training, not just the right technology.
What You Can and Can't Input
On the free tier and personal Pro, the rules around whether your input may be used for training vary by plan. Team and Enterprise are designed so that customer data is not used for model training. Either way, the following three should be in your internal policy:
- Do not input personal data, My Number identifiers, or health information
- Handle non-public financials and corporate strategy only on a business plan
- Where customer contracts restrict third-party disclosure, check before input
Build Human Final Review Into the Workflow
Don't send AI output directly to customers. Build "human in the loop" review into the workflow. Especially when figures, dates, proper nouns, or legal judgments are involved, treat AI output as a draft.
Internal Training and Pilot Use
Don't roll out company-wide on day one. Run a 2-4 week pilot with 3-5 people, measure time saved and impact, then expand. Sharing the prompts and lessons from the pilot as internal knowledge makes the second-and-later cohorts ramp up dramatically faster.
Mihata's Claude Adoption Support
Mihata provides hands-on, ongoing support that doesn't end at "we deployed it." We cover tool selection, building an internal prompt library, and embedding Claude into workflows—end to end.
Custom AI as an Option
Beyond using Claude as-is, we build custom "internal knowledge AI," customer-service AI, and LINE bots trained on your operating manuals and past inquiry histories. For business-specific problems that off-the-shelf AI can't solve, we design an AI assistant that fits your company.
Monthly AI Meeting
"We deployed it but adoption isn't spreading" is one of the most common requests we hear. In our monthly AI Meeting we talk through frontline issues and write prompts together on the spot to drive adoption. For website production, companies founded within the last five years can use a plan with zero up-front cost and a free design draft the next day.
