Back in April I wrote about leaked details of a Claude design studio, when nobody outside Anthropic had used it. Six months on, the design tool is real and out of beta, and on 8 October Anthropic put two new things next to it. Claude Dashboards builds a live dashboard from a plain-English question about your data, and Claude Motion turns a report or a chart into a short animation you can download as a video.
I've spent this week reading the help pages behind Anthropic's announcement, because that's where you find out which plans get what and what's switched off by default. If I were testing these with an agency team, I'd start with Dashboards, because it's the one where a mistake reaches a client fastest.
What shipped, and who gets it
Claude Dashboards is in beta on paid plans, which the Dashboards help page spells out as Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Claude Motion is in beta on Team and Enterprise only. Claude Design, along with Docs and Slides, has left beta and is now on every plan, Free included. Since 16 September it's also worked inside every Claude conversation, so your team doesn't need to go to a separate site to use it.
Check your admin settings before anyone starts. On Enterprise, Dashboards and Motion stay off until an owner switches them on under "Organization settings", in the Artifacts section. On Team plans, Motion is on by default. And the Claude Design product page says Design, Slides and Docs switch on by default for most Enterprise organisations today, 15 October. If you're on Enterprise and nobody has told the team, some of them will find it before you've planned anything.
Step one: build one client report in Claude Dashboards
You ask a question in plain words. Claude writes the SQL, runs it against your data, builds the dashboard and keeps it updated as the data changes. Each chart shows the query behind it and when its data was last refreshed, and you can click any number and ask Claude to explain how it got there.
The catch for agencies is where the data lives. The help page names data warehouses (Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks and Snowflake) and apps you've connected to Claude, with Salesforce as its example. It doesn't mention spreadsheets, Google Analytics or ad platforms. So if a client's numbers already sit in BigQuery or Snowflake, that's your test case. If they're spread across five platform logins and a Google Sheet, I'd wait for the documentation to catch up before promising a client anything.
Anthropic is also upfront that Claude Dashboards is built for quick, exploratory questions, like this week's signups against last month's. For deeper analysis you send the dashboard on to another tool: Amplitude, Grafana, Hex, Mixpanel, Omni, Perplexity, PostHog or Sigma today, with Databricks Genie, Looker, monday.com and Tableau listed as coming soon. Honestly, quick and exploratory describes a lot of client calls, where someone asks a question nobody prepared for and the account manager promises to come back with an answer by Friday.
Step two: decide who checks the numbers
I'd make this its own step, because a dashboard that looks finished gets forwarded. A chart that counts the wrong thing does real damage once it's sitting in a client's inbox.
The tool makes checking fairly easy. Every chart shows its query, and Claude will explain that query in plain words, so whoever checks can compare one or two numbers against the source platform without writing any SQL themselves. Dashboards also start private to you, and sharing outside your organisation only works if your admin allows it. That's a setting worth agreeing before a client asks for a link.
Name the person who checks before anyone builds anything. I wrote about this in why your team is ignoring AI: the teams where a new tool sticks are the ones where a manager backs it and follows through.
Step three: put your brand into Claude Design before the pitch work starts
This is the one I'd expect most of your team to touch first, because it's on every plan and it sits inside the chat they already use. For pitch decks and campaign visuals, the part to set up first is the design system. You can import one from a GitHub repo, design files or raw uploads. Claude checks what it makes against that system before you see it, and an admin can lock a team to one approved system. Work goes out as PowerPoint, PDF or HTML, and there are connectors to tools your designers already use, including Adobe, Canva, Gamma, Miro and Wix.
If your team has been using the standalone site at claude.ai/design, it closes on 14 December. There's a "Migrate team design systems" button on the Artifacts page that copies every design system in your organisation in one go, but the migration guide says chats and project comments stay behind and get deleted after the site closes. The product page also warns that migrated systems may need tidying up. When I moved my own design system into Claude at the start of October, the current brand set and my deck kit came across and an older website kit didn't, so check what arrived before your designers build on it.
For the pitch test itself, take a brief your team built a deck for last month. Give Claude Design the same brief with your design system attached, then put the two decks side by side in front of whoever signs off pitches.
Step four: make one animation with Claude Motion
Claude Motion is the one I'd explain carefully to a creative team, because the name suggests more than it does. It doesn't use a video generation model, so there's no generated footage and no AI-generated people. Claude writes code that animates your text, charts, shapes and images, and the result plays like a short video. Because it's code, you can change one word, one number or the timing of one scene and leave the rest alone.
You start it by typing /motion in the message box, or by choosing Output and then Motion. You edit it in the editor or by asking Claude, and you export it as an MP4. For finishing, the announcement says you can open it in Adobe, Descript, HeyGen, Higgsfield, invideo, Luma AI or Runway, with Canva and Captions coming soon.
Anthropic's own examples are mostly internal ones, like a 30-second explainer of a quarterly report for an all-hands or an animated chart for a board deck. For an agency, I'd test it on an animated stat for a client's social feed, or on the one chart in a pitch you want the room to remember. Check two things before you promise one to a client. The help page names MP4 and says nothing about sizes, so make sure you can get a vertical version out. And longer or more complex animations use more of your plan's usage limit than a normal message, so see what one costs you before you plan a month of social posts around it.
The part that's still your team's job
All three tools get you a first version quickly. Someone on your team still has to decide whether the numbers are right and whether the work is fit to send to a client. Anthropic's announcement puts it plainly: "Claude makes the first version, and you decide what gets shared."
So pick one owner for each tool and one real job for each, and give it a fortnight on live client work before you decide whether it earns a place in how the team works.
If you'd like help turning a trial like this into a habit your whole team keeps, that's the work I do with agency teams.