Claude expands with research tools and Google Workspace integration

Anthropic has introduced two major upgrades to Claude: a powerful new Research feature and a Google Workspace integration, both designed to deepen the assistant's collaboration abilities across professional and personal workflows.

These additions align with Anthropic’s vision for Claude as a “collaborative partner” that saves hours of work by delivering high-quality results in minutes.

Research: Smarter, Context-Aware Information Gathering

Claude's new Research feature allows the model to independently search both the web and internal documents to accelerate your decision-making and streamline your next steps. Unlike standard search, Claude operates agentically—conducting a series of linked searches that build on one another to explore a topic from multiple angles. This method produces in-depth answers with clear citations, making it easy to verify and trust Claude's conclusions.

• Systematic exploration: Claude breaks down questions into sub-questions, conducts multiple related searches, and updates its reasoning as it gathers new information.

• Cited answers: All findings come with inline citations, making it easy to verify sources and trust Claude’s conclusions.

• Speed and depth: Research results arrive in minutes, striking a balance between efficiency and thoroughness.

Google Workspace Integration: Email, Calendar, and Docs

Claude now connects directly with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs—giving it deeper context about your day-to-day work and communication without needing manual uploads. By connecting Google Workspace, users get:

• Smarter task execution: Claude can summarize meetings, extract action items from email threads, search through relevant documents, or see your calendar commitments.

• Context-rich responses: Information is pulled directly from Workspace files and messages, reducing back-and-forth and enabling precise, personalized answers.

• Secure and cited: Claude maintains enterprise-level security and provides citations, ensuring trustworthy use of your data.

Use Cases Across Roles

Anthropic highlighted how different users benefit from combining Research with Workspace:

• Marketing teams: Generate launch plans using internal strategy docs plus external competitive analysis.

• Sales reps: Prepare detailed briefings using past client communications, calendars invites, and recent company updates.

• Engineers: Integrate APIs by referencing system specs, internal designs, and external standards to create technical solutions

• Students: Build customized study plans using notes, course materials, and searching the latest academic research.

• Parents: Organize family life by combining email reminders, school, work and personal calendars, and local event searches like community events, weather forecasts that would affect family plans.

Google Docs Cataloging for Enterprise Users

Claude Enterprise customers can now activate document cataloging to improve search quality across internal knowledge bases. This feature builds a secure index of an organization’s documents to enhance retrieval—no need to specify file names or locations.

• Improved accuracy: Claude surfaces relevant content even from lengthy or fragmented documentation.

• Built for privacy: All document indexing is handled securely, ensuring full data control remains with the organization.

Availability and Access

• Research is in early beta for Max, Team, and Enterprise users in the U.S., Japan, and Brazil. Simply enable the Research setting directly within the chat interface.
  

• Web search, launched in March in the U.S., is now also available in Brazil and Japan. Web search is automatically enabled for paid plans in these regions. Claude for Work administrators can manage organization-wide access in settings.
  

• Google Workspace integration is in beta for all paid users and can be enabled in profile settings. Team and Enterprise admins need to enable Google Workspace access across their domain before users can connect their accounts. Claude Enterprise admins can also activate Google Docs cataloging organization-wide to improve document retrieval.

What This Means

Anthropic’s new capabilities signal a leap forward in making AI more context-aware, reliable, and seamlessly embedded into everyday workflows. By combining Research with Google Workspace integration, Claude moves beyond being just a chatbot—it becomes a true digital collaborator that understands your priorities, knows your schedule, and brings you timely, verifiable information from both internal files and the web.

This kind of real-time, multi-source reasoning has the potential to transform how individuals and teams operate. From speeding up strategic planning to supporting deeper technical and academic research, Claude is now better equipped to handle the nuances of your workday with less back-and-forth and greater accuracy.

For enterprises, the cataloging feature further boosts Claude’s usefulness as a knowledge assistant, unlocking insight buried across fragmented documentation without compromising security. And with features rolling out across global regions and plan tiers, this is just the beginning of Claude’s evolution into a trusted research and productivity partner.

These updates suggest a future where AI doesn’t just help you find answers—it helps you think better.

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.