On Tuesday night I ran my AI Systems Masterclass and showed the same AI employee twice.
The first time, I ran my Sales Call Analyzer in a regular chat. It read a sales call transcript and gave me a score of 6.5 out of 10, three moments that cost me and what I did well. Useful, but it didn't know anything about my company.
The second time, I ran the exact same skill inside my company's Claude Project. Same transcript. This time it knew my AI employee roster, my clients and testimonials, what we sell and our price point, so the coaching was about my offer and my buyers instead of sales in general.
That difference is what a Claude Project does. Here's how to set one up for your business.
What is a Claude Project?
A Claude Project is a workspace that holds your files and your instructions, so every chat inside it starts with the same context about your business.
Think of it like the onboarding binder you'd hand a new hire on day one. In a regular chat, Claude is a contractor who just walked in the door. Inside a project, it has already read the binder.
Projects are available on every Claude plan, including free, though the free plan caps you at five projects. On paid plans, Anthropic says a project can hold a lot more material, because once your files get close to the limit Claude switches to searching them instead of reading everything at once. On Team and Enterprise plans you can share a project with your team as view-only or with editing access.
What should go into a Claude Project for your business?
Upload the things a new hire would need to do the job without coming back to you with questions every five minutes.
Here's what's in my company project, the one I call the TMAC Workspace:
- My AI employee roster, so Claude knows which skills exist and what each one does
- Clients and testimonials
- What we sell and the price point
- Our design system and logos
For the masterclass, I also built a sample project for a deck and porch builder in the Lowcountry. Its files were the company profile, build specs for coastal guidance, terms and processes, past projects, a proposal playbook, a pricing playbook, common homeowner concerns and testimonials.
Then I pasted in a transcript from a site visit and said, "Here's my site visit with Sarah from this afternoon, build her a proposal." It came back with a three-tier proposal priced off the pricing playbook, written around what the homeowner said she wanted: a seat for everyone, a place for the grill and a target of Thanksgiving. Claude could do that because the pricing and the process were already sitting in the project.
A few rules I follow on files:
- Write it down if it lives in your head. Your pricing logic, how you handle a refund, what you say when someone pushes back on price. If it isn't written, Claude can't read it.
- Use examples of finished work. Two or three past proposals or emails teach Claude more than a page describing your tone.
- Keep one file per subject. One file for pricing, one for testimonials, one for services. When something changes you update one file instead of hunting through five.
- Leave out what doesn't help the job. Old drafts and outdated price sheets give Claude wrong answers with total confidence.
How do you write instructions for a Claude Project?
Project instructions tell Claude who it is inside this project and how to behave. They apply to every chat in the project, so keep them short and stable.
The deck and porch project started with one line: "Role: you're the head operations manager for this company." From there, good instructions cover:
- Role: who Claude is in this project
- What it's for: the kinds of work that happen here
- Rules: what it should never do, like quoting a price that isn't in the pricing file or sending anything without your approval
- Where to look: which file to check first for pricing, services or tone
- Format: how you like answers laid out
I use the same structure I teach for prompts: role, task, context, constraints, output. The difference is that project instructions describe the job in general and a single prompt describes one task.
Should you have one Claude Project or several?
Someone asked this in the chat on Tuesday. Can you set up one assistant to do all of those things, or do you need many?
My answer was many, for skills. For projects, I'd start with one company project and add more when an area of the business needs its own files.
A company project holds the things every part of your business needs: who you are, what you sell, your pricing, your voice. Then you might add a sales project with call transcripts and proposals, a finance project with your chart of accounts and vendor list, or a client project for a big account. Each one keeps its files focused, and focused files give Claude better answers.
I also use projects for one-off builds. A real estate broker on the call was trying to get Claude to build her a CRM and kept going in circles. My advice was to start a project just for brainstorming the CRM, write down everything she wants it to do, and work out the plan there before building anything.
How do Claude Projects and skills work together?
A project holds what Claude knows. A skill holds how to do one task.
That's the jump from level 1 to level 2 on the four levels of an AI employee. Level 1, the contractor, is a skill running in a plain chat. Level 2, the trained employee, is that same skill running inside a project, so it has your company's context and knowledge every time.
If you haven't written your first skill yet, start with how to write an SOP AI can follow. An SOP saved as a skill and run inside a well-stocked project is the setup I use for almost every AI employee I build.
Levels 3 and 4 build on top of this. You connect Claude to your tools like Gmail, your CRM and your calendar, and then you put the work on a schedule. None of that works well if Claude doesn't know your business first, so the project comes before all of it.
How do you set up a Claude Project, step by step?
- In Claude, open Projects and create a new project. Name it after the area of the business it serves.
- Add your instructions: role, what the project is for, rules, where to look and format.
- Upload your files using the plus button. Start with what you sell, your pricing, your process docs and two or three examples of finished work.
- Run one task you already do every week inside the project and read the answer closely.
- Wherever Claude guessed, add the missing information to a file or a rule to the instructions.
- Run it again.
The first version takes an afternoon. After that it's small updates.
How do you keep a Claude Project up to date?
Treat the project like the binder it is. When your prices change, your offer changes or you sign a new client you want to use as proof, update the file that day.
At the end of a good working session, I ask Claude what it learned that should go into the project files. Then I decide what's worth keeping and add it. Over a few months the project ends up knowing your business better than most of your documentation does, because it's the one place you keep current.
Where should you start?
Start with one company project. Upload what you sell, your pricing, one process you run every week and a few examples of finished work, then run that weekly task inside it and see where Claude guesses.
If you'd rather build your projects and AI employees with me in the room, that's what the AI Operating System is. It's six live sessions where we install working AI systems in your business, starting with the company project every other employee runs inside.
