Anthropic Launches Claude Sonnet 5.5

Good day!

This week brought some notable releases from the big AI platforms, alongside a stronger-than-usual group of genuinely new business applications worth paying attention to.

From Anthropic launching Claude Sonnet 5.5 and ChatGPT expanding what Voice can do, to new products tackling accounts receivable, accounting workflows and customer calls, here’s what changed — and what looks genuinely useful.

Let’s dive in.

F I N A N C E

Digest: A signed contract normally creates another job for finance: build the invoice, remember the payment terms, chase it at the right moment and work out which invoice an incoming payment belongs to. Ramp AR is designed to take much of that work off the spreadsheet and inbox.

For: Finance teams, founders and operations teams already using Ramp to manage business spending.

Solves: The administrative gap between closing a sale and actually receiving the money — especially re-entering contract details, preparing collection emails and reconciling incoming payments.

Price: Free tier available. It includes invoice creation, collections, cash application and accounting sync for supported workflows. More advanced billing capabilities sit in the paid Receivables add-on; Ramp does not currently offer AR as a standalone product.

Setup: Easy — Ramp says AR can be configured in around five minutes. It can create invoices from contracts and purchase orders, apply collection rules, match payments to open invoices and keep supported accounting workflows synchronised. It is most compelling for businesses already inside Ramp rather than companies looking for a completely independent invoicing tool.

Try it → Ramp Accounts Receivable

M A R K E T I N G

Digest: The hard part of short-form advertising is rarely making one decent video; it is producing enough new hooks and formats to keep testing. Viralway takes an app or SaaS brief and turns it into vertical ads using AI-written scripts and licensed creator footage rather than waiting for another shoot.

For: Mobile-app founders, SaaS companies, performance marketers and small growth teams running paid or organic short-form video.

Solves: Constantly sourcing creators, writing variations and editing another batch of TikTok, Reels and Shorts creatives simply to keep advertising tests moving.

Price: Free plan available. It includes five creatives per month for one product. Starter costs $25/month, or $20/month billed annually, while Pro costs $70/month, or $60/month annually.

Setup: Easy — brief the app and target audience, then Viralway assembles 9:16 videos with hooks, scripts, footage and captions. Paid plans can publish directly to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The model is particularly suited to mobile apps; it is less obviously useful to businesses that do not naturally sell through short-form video.

Try it → Viralway

C U S T O M E R__S E R V I C E

Digest: Miss a call while you are under a sink and the customer may simply phone the next plumber. Wakeman is built around that very ordinary small-business problem: it answers in the contractor’s name, works out what the customer needs and sends the job details to the person who needs them.

For: US plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing and restoration businesses, particularly smaller teams without a permanently staffed reception desk.

Solves: Losing enquiries because nobody can answer while technicians are on jobs, after hours or dealing with another customer.

Price: From $149/month. After Hours costs $149/month, Front Desk $349 and Dispatch $829, with a 14-day free trial and included calling minutes varying by plan.

Setup: Easy — keep the existing business number and forward eligible calls to Wakeman. It can collect the address and problem, distinguish routine work from configured emergencies, alert the on-call person and, once enabled, book jobs into Jobber. It is currently available in the United States; Housecall Pro is not generally available yet.

Try it → Wakeman

New apps weren’t the only things shipping this week. These were the biggest model releases, product upgrades and meaningful changes across the AI tools businesses are already using.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, bringing its latest model generation to ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API. OpenAI also cut API pricing by 50% compared with GPT-5.6 promotional pricing.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, its most capable model in the new Claude 5.5 family, with lower pricing than the previous Opus generation and a focus on complex professional and coding work.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, a faster and cheaper model aimed at everyday coding and knowledge work. Anthropic says it runs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and can cost up to 30% less for most work.

ChatGPT added plugins to Voice and brought Voice into Work, allowing supported connected apps to be used during spoken conversations and letting users start documents, spreadsheets, presentations and browser tasks by voice before continuing them in text.

Meta expanded Muse for Small Business, adding business skills and connections to services including Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Slack, Canva, Notion, Figma, Zoom, Klaviyo and Asana. Muse can carry out operational tasks but still requires approval before actions such as publishing, sending or spending.

Amazon upgraded Seller Assistant and redesigned Seller Central around AI, allowing sellers to use AI across inventory, advertising, sales and compliance. Amazon also announced Selling Partner plugins that let tools including Claude work with a seller’s catalogue and live business data.

Google Gemini expanded its Connected Apps ecosystem, adding services including Airtable, Linear, monday.com, PandaDoc, Zoho, Adobe, Squarespace, Webflow and others — materially widening the business workflows Gemini can work across.

Adobe brought its creative tools to Gemini and expanded its Claude integration, making Photoshop, Lightroom, Express and Firefly capabilities available through Gemini while adding Acrobat and richer Adobe Express editing inside Claude.

Google Vids added Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, introducing improved scene extension, exact generated-clip durations and 1080p video generation and upscaling inside Google’s video editor.

Microsoft introduced a new Copilot architecture built around Home, Code and Autopilot. Most of the new experience is still rolling out through previews, although Copilot Managed Runtime entered public preview this week.

GitHub Copilot expanded its models, agent sandboxing and collaboration workflows, adding newer model options for eligible users alongside local agent sandboxing and improvements to its Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations.

Cursor introduced Rollouts and Security Review, two new AI bots for Teams and Enterprise customers that can monitor software as it deploys, flag possible regressions and review pull requests for exploitable security problems.

ElevenLabs released Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, expanding its speech-generation platform with a more expressive model and a lower-latency Turbo option supporting more than 90 languages. The company also opened its image, video and reusable template tools through APIs, making automated creative-production workflows easier to build.

NVIDIA launched its Open Agent Safety Platform, combining open-source software and a reference hardware design intended to monitor AI agents and enforce boundaries around what they are allowed to do — primarily relevant to organisations deploying agents with significant system access.

SpaceXAI introduced Team Bots, extending Grok Bot towards shared AI coworkers built around a team role or workflow rather than an individual assistant, with shared files, applications and skills alongside private user conversations.

Next week we will be back next week with another sift through the new launches — and only the ones that give us a genuine reason to pay attention.

See you soon,

News Digest AI team