AI Communications
Running a small business means wearing every hat: marketing, sales, customer service, accounting, and whatever else comes up before lunch. It also means juggling a handful of different tools just to keep the lights on, and losing hours to work that has nothing to do with why you started the business in the first place.
RingCentral and Anthropic teamed up to change that by bringing the power of conversation data into Claude for Small Business. Through this partnership, small business owners gain a clear pulse on their business, spend less time digging for answers, take action, and scale faster. For example, owners can ask a direct question within Claude like ‘Which customers still need a follow-up?’ and Claude will pull the information and draft and send a follow-up message, closing the loop with a single prompt.
As Akshay Srivastava, EVP & GM of SMB at RingCentral, puts it: “Small business owners spend too much time digging through every customer call or message to figure out what needs their attention next. RingCentral gives owners the ability to easily access and act on the conversations flowing through their business, right within Claude where they’re already working. The result is an owner who can follow up faster, catch a problem earlier, and stay focused on their customers.”
It’s a shift industry analysts are already tracking. According to Shelly Kramer, Founder & Principal Analyst, Kramer & Company: “Most of the AI built for small business so far has been trained on structured data, like invoices, contacts, and deal stages. RingCentral is bringing something different into Claude for Small Business: the actual conversations happening between a business and its customers. For a team too small to have someone reviewing every call or message, that’s not a nice-to-have — it’s context they’ve simply never had access to before.”
For a look at what that means in practice, take Captivo Labs. CTO and Co-Founder Giv Parvaneh is already seeing the time savings firsthand: “As CTO and co-founder of a small, distributed team, I used to burn 15 minutes every morning digging through 100+ messages across chats just to find what actually applied to me. Using the RingCentral connector in Claude, I now get a scheduled summary of only my mentions and action items — cutting that to seconds, which is a 98% time savings, every single day.”
Installing Claude for Small Business
RingCentral customers using Claude can install the Small Business plugin in three simple steps:
- Open Claude and select Customize in the left sidebar.
- Select the search icon and enter “small business.”
- Find Small Business and select Install.
Already have the Small Business plugin? Go to Customize > Plugins > Small Business, and you’ll see RingCentral listed as a new connector.
Select Connect on RingCentral to sign in with your RingCentral account and approve access. Your existing RingCentral permissions carry over, so Claude only sees what you have access to, and only takes the actions you allow.
See Claude for Small Business in action
Join RingCentral and Anthropic on October 1st at 10am PT for a live walkthrough of what’s possible.
Setting up RingCentral Chat and making your first prompts
Once RingCentral Chat is connected, give Claude some context on your business so every skill starts off knowing how you work:
| Customize the “smb-complete” plugin for me based on my company. |
Claude will ask a few questions — what you do, who’s on your team, what’s hardest right now — and save your answers so every skill already knows your context. For a small business, that might be as simple as “it’s me and three part-time staff, and I do the books myself on Sundays.”
There’s no special syntax to learn. Describe the job the way you’d hand it to someone you trust, and Claude reads your RingCentral chats, your other connected tools, or both, and picks the right skill for it.
A few good first prompts to try:
- What RingCentral messages did I miss?
- Catch me up on my RingCentral sales team chat.
- Did anyone mention a customer issue in RingCentral this week?
Doing even more in Claude with RingCentral
Claude for Small Business isn’t limited to pulling information out of RingCentral. It connects data across your tools and can act on it, putting your business communications front and center. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
1. Turn customer chats into CRM-ready replies
A customer messages asking about an order. Normally, you’d stop what you’re doing, check the chat, pull up tickets and emails, or ping a coworker for a status update.
With Claude, just type:
| Review this customer’s message. What’s the status of her order? Give me a summary and draft a response back to her. Ask me if I approve the message and notes, and if I do, log them into HubSpot. |
Claude reads the RingCentral chat, checks HubSpot for her order and loyalty status, drafts a reply that reflects both, and logs a note on her contact record — all before you approve and send.
2. Give invoice follow-ups the context from your team chat
Small businesses run on trust and personal relationships. Sometimes that means giving a customer an extension on an invoice. Too often, that exception lives only in someone’s memory or a quick team message. Claude for Small Business lets you manage invoicing without losing that context:
| Find overdue invoices. If we made an exception, skip those but summarize it for me. For past-due customers, craft language that’s compassionate but reminds them their invoice is overdue. Base the tone on how overdue each invoice is. |
Claude checks your RingCentral team chat for any exceptions you’ve already agreed to, ranks the rest of your overdue invoices, and drafts reminders — automatically leaving out the customers you’ve already taken care of.
3. Turn marketing brainstorms into assets
Marketing is hard for a small business. Your team comes up with plenty of good ideas, but even a rough proof of concept usually means building the messaging yourself and handing it off to a designer or agency just to see if it’s worth pursuing.
With Claude for Small Business, you can turn a RingCentral team conversation into a marketing kit in minutes using Google and Canva. Try a prompt like:
| Read our messages about [marketing idea] in [RingCentral team name]. Create a marketing plan and initial marketing assets using Google and Canva. Give me three different creative styles to explore. |
Claude reads the RingCentral thread, pulls out the idea your team landed on, builds a marketing plan, and drafts the designs in Canva for you to review.
Find more RingCentral connectors for Claude
Claude for Small Business gives you a ready-to-use set of tools out of the box, and there’s more where that came from. Visit the RingCentral App Gallery for new connectors and capabilities as they’re added, and join our webinar to see what else you can do with AI.
To see it in action, join RingCentral and Anthropic for the RingCentral Meets Claude webinar, October 1st at 10:00am PT. Register here.
Originally published Sep 15, 2026
