How To Make Claude or CodexYour Personal Business Assistant.
AI is moving fast. Good news: you don't have to figure it out from scratch. Two tools — Claude and Codex — can already act as your personal business assistant: reading your email, talking to your software, drafting your work, and running the repetitive parts of your business while you focus on the parts that grow it.
This guide walks you through setting them up, connecting them to the tools you already use, and turning them into the assistant you wish you'd hired three years ago. No jargon. No PhD required.
What Claude and Codex Actually Are
Forget the jargon. Forget “LLM” and “transformer” and “tokens.” In plain English: Claude and Codex are two extremely smart assistants you can talk to in regular sentences. They read what you give them, think about it, and either answer back or take action.
The difference between them and the AI you've seen on Twitter is this: they can now actually do things. Read your email. Update your CRM. Draft your contracts. Process your invoices. Send your calendar invites. Build entire workflows for you. Not in some futuristic 2027 way — today, on your laptop, this afternoon.
Made by Anthropic
Best for thoughtful work
Use it for
- Drafting emails and proposals
- Analyzing documents and PDFs
- Researching customers and competitors
- Customer support replies
- Writing long-form content
- Making decisions when you're stuck
Claude has a special version called Claude Code that runs ON your computer and can edit files, browse the web, manage projects. Free to install.
Made by OpenAI
Best for technical & data work
Use it for
- Crunching numbers and spreadsheets
- Quick automation scripts
- Image and chart generation
- Technical research
- Code that needs to run
- Anything quick + transactional
Codex is built into ChatGPT. The free tier gives you most of what you'd need to start; the $20/mo plan unlocks the most powerful version.
Get the full setup walkthrough
Five more parts: install steps for both Claude and Codex, the 10 most useful skills, how to connect them to your tools (MCP servers), and 4 real workflows you can set up this afternoon.
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