There’s an enormous paradigm shift happening. The most powerful move you can make right now isn’t buying more software — it’s getting really good at the software you likely already have

Something seismic is happening in AI right now, and most business owners are not even aware of it.

Over the last several weeks, Anthropic — the company behind Claude, one of the top AI platforms in the world — has been making a string of announcements that would have seemed impossible just a couple of years ago. They launched a Legal plugin for Claude Cowork, capable of handling contract review, NDA triage, compliance workflows, and legal briefings. The announcement was significant enough that shares in Thomson Reuters, RELX, LegalZoom, and Wolters Kluwer immediately tanked — investors recognizing that a category of specialized software was suddenly being absorbed into a general-purpose platform. Then came Claude Code Security, which scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted patches — rattling the entire cybersecurity software sector in a single day. And just this week, at their Enterprise Agents event on February 24th, Anthropic announced a sweeping expansion of Claude Cowork with enterprise connectors, department-specific plugins, and critically — Claude in Excel, allowing Claude to work natively inside the spreadsheets and presentations your team already uses every day.

The pattern here is unmistakable, and it has enormous implications for how you should be thinking about AI in your organization. More and more can be done from within a single general purpose platform like Claude. Robust AI adoption for franchising means getting really good at those platforms. 

The Current Playbook Is Becoming Obsolete

For the last 20 to 30 years, building out a business’s technology meant assembling a collection of point solutions — one tool for this workflow, another for that function. A CRM here, a legal review tool there, a security scanner somewhere else, an analytics platform in another corner. Each one purpose-built, each one requiring its own learning curve, its own budget line, its own vendor relationship, and its own ongoing maintenance.

That was the only way to get sophisticated capability in specific areas. You paid for depth by accepting fragmentation.

What’s happening right now is that general-purpose AI platforms are collapsing those specialized functions onto a single platform at a pace no one fully anticipated. Legal analysis. Security scanning. Financial modeling. HR workflows. Data analysis. Marketing. Document creation. Native Excel and PowerPoint integration. All of it now available inside one platform, at a fraction of what dedicated tools would cost, and improving every single month.

For most businesses, this changes the calculus entirely. For businesses in franchising, it may be the most significant technology shift in a generation.

What This Means for a Lean Organization

Consider the math. A best-in-class general-purpose AI platform runs roughly $100 per person per month for a team plan (more for larger Enterprises). For a team of 20 people, that’s $2,000 a month to give every single person in your organization access to a tool that can handle legal document review, draft compliance communications, build polished Excel models, research competitive intelligence, write and edit any kind of content, analyze data,automate dozens of recurring workflows, and literally much much much more — all without switching apps.

Now compare that to what organizations are actually spending. A dedicated legal review tool. A separate analytics platform. A contract management solution. An AI writing assistant layered on top. An internal IT project to try to build something custom. Before long you’re looking at over a hundred thousand dollars per year in software costs for a business under 50 people — and that’s before you account for the time cost of training people on each platform, managing vendor relationships, and dealing with the inevitable integrations that don’t quite work.

The general-purpose platform at $100 per person per month is not a compromise. Right now, in most cases, it is the better solution — and the gap is widening every week as these platforms absorb more and more specialized capability.

Franchising is actually particularly well-positioned here. Franchise organizations have historically run lean tech stacks by necessity — there’s only so much complexity a franchisee or a small franchise support team can absorb. That’s not a disadvantage anymore. It means you don’t have an overgrown portfolio of legacy point solutions to unwind. You can move directly to a general-purpose platform and get more capability than most of your larger, more complex competitors are actually using.

The Mistake Businesses Are Making Right Now

Here’s the irony: at the exact moment these platforms are becoming extraordinarily powerful, we’re seeing a lot of organizations go the other direction. They bring in a fit-for-purpose AI tool to handle one specific workflow. Some workflows are best served by such a tool. Others can easily be handled by the general purpose platform.

To be clear, getting AI into one workflow is better than nothing. 

But doing so when a general purpose tool is better prevents the organization from enjoying the compounding benefit that makes general-purpose platforms so powerful. When your people are genuinely fluent with a top-tier platform — when they use it every day across a wide variety of tasks — the efficiency gains don’t add up linearly. They multiply. You’re not saving 20 minutes here and 30 minutes there. You are fundamentally changing the leverage each person in your organization has on their work. Our CEO wrote about how one general purpose platform saves him two hours a day every day.

The Real Unlock: Fluency and Intuition

Here’s what we want to be direct about, because it’s the thing we push on hardest with the organizations we work with: the platform is only as valuable as your team’s ability to use it well.

This is not a tool you hand to someone with a quick onboarding and expect results. The people who are getting two hours of their day back — every single day — are the people who have developed genuine AI fluency. They have the literacy to know what to ask for. They have the intuition to know when AI can do the heavy lifting and when it needs direction. They understand how to work with these platforms as thinking partners rather than just search engines.

That fluency is a skill, and it’s a learnable one. But it requires actual training and deliberate adoption, not a one-hour webinar and a link to some documentation.

The organizations that invest in building that fluency across their teams — not just for one or two tech-forward employees, but broadly — are the ones who are going to look back in one year and realize they created a structural advantage. Their people accomplish more. Their overhead is lower. Their response time on everything from legal reviews to marketing to financial analysis is compressed from days to hours. Their franchisees are operating more productively and really can get more done with less.

The organizations that don’t build that fluency will have spent money on software and have very less to show for it.

The Window Is Open

Anthropic’s announcements over the last few weeks are a signal, not a destination. The pace of capability expansion on these platforms is not slowing down. If anything, what happened to the stock prices of all those specialized software companies tells you exactly where the industry is headed — toward consolidation onto powerful general-purpose platforms that keep absorbing the functions that used to require point solutions.

For a lean business in franchising, the playbook right now is simple in principle, even if it takes real commitment to execute: choose a top-tier general-purpose platform and invest deliberately in building your team’s fluency with it. And that fluency will guide you on where to thoughtfully attach fit-for-purpose solutions.

The capability to get two hours per day per person is already there. The question is whether your team knows how to tap into it. AI intuition provides the definitive answer.