Claude or ChatGPT for your business: how to choose, and what to connect first

Which tasks should you compare them on?

Yours. General benchmarks measure average capabilities; you need to know which one writes in your tone, summarises your documents without making anything up and follows your instructions. Put together a small test bench:

• Writing: a few real, anonymised customer emails, a sales proposal, a LinkedIn post.
• Document analysis: a contract, a specification, a long report, with questions you already know the answers to.
• Customer assistant: your frequently asked questions, including a few trick ones that fall outside your offer.
• Data: a spreadsheet export to summarise or reformat.

What happens to your data, depending on the plan?

This is the criterion you can’t fix after the fact. Anthropic states that, by default, data from its commercial offerings (Team and Enterprise plans, API) is not used to train its models, unless you submit feedback or give explicit permission, and that admins on a Team plan can turn that feedback off. OpenAI, for its part, states that data sent to its API is not used for training unless you explicitly opt in.

For ChatGPT’s team plans, read the current terms on OpenAI’s own pages before choosing: we don’t summarise them here. In every case, ban free personal accounts for company data, and apply the principles set out in the AI guidance of the CNIL, France’s data protection authority: a clear purpose, the minimum of data, and informing the people concerned.

Assistant

Do you have a slot on Saturday morning?

Yes: 9:00 or 10:30. Which one shall I book?

10:30, thanks.

All booked, the confirmation is on its way by email.

Write a message…Talk to the team

Demo: an illustrated screen, with no prices, names or real clients.

Chat interface or API integration?

These are two separate uses. The chat interface, on a business subscription, serves employees day to day: writing, summarising, thinking things through. The API lets you plug the model into your own tools: a form that sorts incoming requests, an assistant on your website, automated document processing.

For an integration, the comparison is less about the model than about everything around it: integration with your software, control over usage-based costs, a log of exchanges. Plan an architecture that lets you switch from one model to another without starting over: you’re no longer dependent on a single provider.

What should you connect first?

An internal, repetitive task whose output is reviewed before it’s used. For example: summarising each incoming request and suggesting a category, drafting a first response to a tender from your past bids, extracting the details of a purchase order into a spreadsheet.

This first project teaches the team to write instructions, spot errors and measure the time saved, without exposing your customers. To find these tasks in your week, see our article on automating your business.

What’s best left unconnected at first

Some uses aren’t ruled out in principle, but they need a framework (informing people, human review, logging) that rarely gets put in place in the first month:

• an assistant that answers customers on its own, with no review and no hand-off to a person;
• anything that commits the business: quotes, contractual terms, responses to a dispute;
• health data, personnel files and highly sensitive information;
• decisions that affect people, such as screening job applications.

Can you use both?

You can, and sometimes it makes sense: one tool for employees’ everyday use, the other for a specific integration where it proved more reliable in your tests. You’ll then have two subscriptions and two sets of usage rules to keep up to date.

For an SME, starting with a single, well-governed tool is often simpler. Our AI integration team runs these tests with you and sets up the first integration, then our automation and custom tools service connects the rest. Our team works from Rhône-Alpes, remotely or on site (our articles for the Lyon area (in French)).