The noise is all about Claude. Nine in ten firms are quietly staying on Copilot.

When we launched our AI Club for accountants, the first session filled up with people showing off what they were doing with Claude. Then someone in the chat went quiet and wrote: "I feel a bit out of place, because I'm on Copilot." So we stopped and asked the room. Are you on Copilot, or on Claude? Almost everyone was on Copilot. The loud voices were on Claude, because they were doing genuinely clever things.

That worry is more common than you would think. I run Theory and Motion, and I spend my days with firms working out where AI fits. The honest question underneath the noise is simple. Claude looks amazing, so should everyone move to it? I answered it at the summit by running the same tasks in both tools, side by side. You can watch the session here. My short answer is probably not.

What makes Claude look magic is mundane: local files and skills

This is what people rave about. Claude Cowork is a desktop app, and because it sits on my machine it can read my files directly. I have a task that runs every night. It opens a folder of receipts with the usual nonsense filenames and reads each one. It renames them, writes me a summary, then pushes them into Xero as unreconciled spent-money transactions with the attachment. My accountant can check everything. It even noticed one receipt had no GST, and on another it copied my handwritten scrawl, "shuttle, airport to hotel in Auckland," straight into the line description.

The daily brief is my favourite. Another scheduled task, it hands me an HTML page each morning with my priorities, who I am meeting and what to watch for. It even tells me to keep it tight, because it knows I talk too much.

None of that runs on a big system I bought. It runs on plain text files, the Markdown kind you can open and read. My sales profile, my priorities, notes on how I work. I ask Claude to take notes on me over time. So when it coaches me, it works from our actual conversations. It knows I get overwhelmed, that I forget what I have already done and that I drift off topic. When I spot something missing in the morning, I ask it to remember, it saves that as a skill, and tomorrow the brief is sharper.

Copilot does the same things, just locked down on purpose

So Claude is impressive. Should everyone move? Probably not. Every one of those tricks has a Copilot version, or soon will.

A Club member came back from holiday to 2,500 emails, asked Copilot to tidy his inbox, and it worked. He now runs it every fifteen minutes, so his inbox stays clean. Microsoft also has Copilot Cowork now, and the important part is what it actually is. Microsoft brought Claude in-house, so Copilot Cowork is Claude, running inside Copilot Premium. You reach it through Frontier, Microsoft's early-release program, which your tenant admin can switch on.

The catch is deliberate. A Club member tried to rebuild my receipts-to-Xero flow in Copilot Cowork. It read the receipts and built a register, then stalled at the push to Xero. Copilot Cowork runs in the browser, not on your desktop, and it stays inside OneDrive and SharePoint. It will not touch your C drive.

That restriction feels frustrating for a small business. It is also the reason IT teams and owners can sleep. With Claude on my desktop, I could wire up my systems and publish a page that let anyone into them, in about ten minutes, and no one could stop me. Copilot keeps all of that contained. The barrier that annoys you is the barrier that protects you.

Claude is ahead of Copilot in time, and you will catch up

Claude is ahead of Copilot in time. That is the real difference, more than any question of better or worse. If you are on Copilot, you get the same capabilities, just later and more secure.

You can see it on the adoption curve. The innovators jump to Claude, happy to experiment and to jump again when the favourite changes. The early adopters stay on Copilot but keep an eye on Claude, because it shows them what is coming to Copilot next. Most firms now run a small lab, a few AI champions playing with Claude, often the audit or forensic teams. The majority stay on Copilot, because it is the most contained place for a whole team to work. In our Club, that majority is about nine in ten.

Microsoft is not even asking you to choose. Inside Copilot you can pick Claude or GPT as the model, because Microsoft is positioning itself as an aggregator rather than a competitor.

The security trade-off is real, and the Xero MCP underwhelms

Two practical things temper the excitement. The first is security. When you use GPT inside Copilot, it stays in your Microsoft tenant. When you use Claude, even inside Copilot, your data goes to Anthropic to be processed, and Microsoft says it strips out anything personal on the way. An AI does that stripping, so you are trusting it. Using Claude directly sends your data overseas, full stop. With Copilot you keep the Microsoft security posture you already have, which is why most firms settle there.

The second is the Xero connection everyone asks about. Xero released an MCP server, a layer that lets an AI talk to Xero without a custom build. QuickBooks Online has one too. I found Xero's very limited. It could not tell me my latest invoice. It handles some reports and cash flow, it is read-only, and it connects to one org, so you cannot reach all your client files. The receipts-to-Xero flow I showed earlier runs on a proper API connection instead, one that Claude wrote and walked me through.

If you're on Copilot, you're with the majority, not behind

So, back to the person in my Club who felt out of place. If you are on Copilot and hearing all the noise about Claude, breathe. You are with the majority, and that is where most of the real work gets done. You are not behind. You are not alone. What you are hearing is the innovators and early adopters running their experiments in public.

I am not telling you to avoid Claude. I love Claude and I use it every day for what it does best. But as the tool a whole team relies on, Copilot is the sensible choice. You will get the clever capabilities in time, without switching products, and you will know it is secure. And if you are new to all of this, that is fine too. It is not rocket science, and you have got this.

Watch the full session here.