Claude Duet is an app that does part of what a chief of staff does for a small business owner. Each morning it sends a short brief on what matters across the owner's connected apps, and through the day it watches those apps and messages the owner when something needs a decision. It runs on iOS, Android and the web, and for now it is limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the US, by waitlist.
A background agent is not new. OpenAI's Dots, launched in September, already work on their own with a cloud computer and a browser, and Claude's Cowork tool already runs scheduled tasks in the cloud. What Duet adds is aim: it is built around the tools a small owner lives in, such as QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, HubSpot and Docusign, and around the owner's own judgment about what to approve.
A schedule produces a list, a watcher makes a decision
A scheduled task is a timer. Every Monday it lists the unpaid invoices, whether or not anything is wrong, so a person still has to read the list and decide. A watcher has to do that deciding itself. One early tester, a brand strategist, had a client call on her calendar. Duet saw that the call fell right before her flight and offered to move it. That took two apps and a judgment, and she had not asked for it.
The watching has a price. Duet looks at the apps every few hours, not nonstop, because constant checking would use up a plan's usage limits much faster. So it suits problems that grow over a day: an unpaid invoice, a double-booked afternoon, a customer email nobody answered. It will not catch a problem that is ten minutes old.
Anthropic itself says this early version may misread a thread or misjudge what is urgent. That is the same weakness the hospital monitors had, and it is the one to measure first.
Your work becomes reading drafts and saying yes
Duet reads and drafts on its own. Before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything, it shows what it is about to do and waits. Purchases go through Stripe's Link wallet, which asks the owner to approve each one and pays with a virtual card, so the real card number is not shared.
For example, a caterer has a dozen customers who pay late. Each morning the brief lists the three invoices that have gone overdue, with a reminder already written for each. The owner softens the tone on one for a customer of ten years and approves all three. If chasing money now takes twenty minutes a day, opening the accounting app, finding who is late and writing the emails, that is about seven hours a month. Most of it becomes a few minutes of reading and tapping.
So the skill that matters is not writing clever prompts. It is reading a draft quickly and knowing what to refuse. An agent that reads your inbox also reads emails from strangers, and Anthropic has added a classifier meant to stop it sharing card numbers and government ID numbers. The screen where you approve is still the last check.
How to judge it in the first week
When you get access, keep a tally for a week. For each message it sends, ask whether it deserved to interrupt you. If most did, connect another app. If half were noise, disconnect the noisiest app before it teaches you to ignore the rest.