Using Claude with Microsoft 365: what to set up first

What Claude can do inside Microsoft 365

Anthropic offers Claude for Microsoft 365, which puts Claude in a sidebar inside Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook. At the time of writing, Anthropic lists the Excel, PowerPoint and Word versions as generally available on paid Claude plans, with Outlook in beta. In practice that means staff can draft and revise documents in your templates, build and check spreadsheets, turn notes into slides and work through email without copying text between windows. Nothing is sent or saved until the person says so.

Claude can also be connected to Microsoft 365 content through a connector, so it can find and use relevant files and messages when answering a question. That is where the real productivity gain is, and where preparation matters.

The principle to plan around

Plan on the basis that an AI assistant can reach whatever the signed-in person can reach. It does not need to break any rules to surface a salary spreadsheet or a board paper; it only needs that file to be sitting in a SharePoint site shared with "Everyone". Most Microsoft 365 tenants have years of this kind of oversharing, and until now it stayed hidden because nobody went looking. An assistant goes looking on request.

Five things to fix first

1. Clean up sharing. Review SharePoint sites, Teams and OneDrive folders shared with everyone in the organisation or by "anyone with the link". Tighten the ones holding HR, finance, client or board material.
2. Label sensitive information. Use Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels so confidential files are identified and protected wherever they travel.
3. Secure the sign-in. Enforce multi-factor authentication and Conditional Access for every account. An attacker who takes over an account inherits its AI assistant too. See Identity and MFA.
4. Choose the right Claude plan. Use a business plan with central administration and single sign-on, not personal accounts. Our plan comparison explains the differences.
5. Decide who approves connections. Administrators should control which connectors are available and to whom, starting with a small pilot group.

Roll out in stages

A staged rollout works better than switching everyone on at once:

1. Pilot with five to ten people from different roles, on real work, for a few weeks.
2. Write down what worked: the tasks where it saved time, the prompts worth sharing and the mistakes it made.
3. Publish a short AI use policy before widening access, so everyone knows what may and may not be shared. See our guide to what to put in an AI use policy.
4. Train people in their own roles. Generic demonstrations don't change habits; showing an accounts officer how to check a reconciliation does.
5. Review access and usage after the first month and adjust.

What about Microsoft Copilot?

The preparation above applies to any assistant connected to your tenant, Copilot included. The sharing clean-up, labelling and identity work are worth doing regardless of which tool you choose, and many organisations use more than one.

How we help

We deploy Claude for Microsoft 365, connect it to your environment and do the tenant preparation that makes it safe. See Claude for Microsoft 365 and Secure Microsoft 365, or read Anthropic's own overview at claude.com.