Claude Duet so far: the proactive part works, the filing does not yet
Claude Duet is the first assistant we have used that starts the conversation. It lives on the phone. In the morning, and a few times through the day, it sends a notification along the lines of “here is what you have coming up, here is what needs doing, do you want me to start on these?” One tap, and it goes off to prepare things while we do something else.
That loop is the point of the product, and it works. This post is about what we like, what is missing for a small consultancy, and the two things we hope come next. If you run your business out of a folder tree and a mailbox, you will recognize the gaps.
The part that works
Most assistants wait to be asked. Duet looks at the calendar and the open threads and asks first. On a day with three client calls, that means the prep is drafted before the first coffee: the notes from last time, the open items, the questions worth raising. We read it, fix what is wrong, and walk into the call ready.
The one-tap start matters more than it sounds. When the cost of delegating is a single tap, delegation happens. When it is opening a laptop and writing a prompt, it often does not. Duet moves the first step from “sit down and ask” to “say yes on the way to the kitchen”, and that is where the gain is.
What is missing: the work does not land where we keep things
Everything Duet prepares lives in Claude. It does not land in the client folder.
That matters more for us than it might for a bigger company. Our whole setup is one folder per client in OneDrive, synced to the laptop, with Claude Code working inside it: contracts, transcripts, exports, the Power BI project, the notes from the last call. Meeting prep is only useful if it is in that folder when the meeting starts. A document is only useful if it is somewhere we can attach it to an email to the client.
Right now the answer is to copy things out of Duet by hand, which is the kind of step the tool exists to remove.
We know the obvious answer is to put everything in GitHub. The website lives there already, and a repository is the natural place for anything Claude writes and rewrites. But not everything in a consulting business belongs in a repository. Signed contracts, meeting transcripts, client exports and the documents we send to customers belong in OneDrive, where the client can be given a link, where the retention rules are set, and where we can find them from a phone in a meeting. We like OneDrive for that, and we are not going to move the business to make a tool happy.
What we hope for is simple to state: let Duet run, analyze and draft, and then hand the result to the place the context already lives, whether that is a Claude Code session or the client folder synced to the laptop. Duet decides what to do; the files end up where the files go.
What is missing: it cannot draft an email
The second gap is Outlook. Claude Code can create a reply draft in the Outlook Drafts folder, with the signature added and the quoted thread kept, ready to read and send. It does that through an app registration of our own with a narrow set of permissions: create mail drafts, create calendar events, and nothing else. It is one of the most useful automations we have, because every client email still gets a human read before it goes anywhere.
Duet uses the Microsoft 365 connector, and that connector can read mail but cannot create a draft. We tried adding the same permissions to the enterprise application the connector uses. It made no difference. So Duet can tell us a reply is due and even write it, but the draft ends up in Claude instead of in Drafts, and we are back to copying.
The fix we would like is the one we already have on the laptop: let the connector, or Duet itself, use a customer-supplied app registration so the organization decides what it can touch. Drafts and calendar events are a sensible floor. Sending is not something we want any assistant to do.
Where that leaves us
Proactive is the right direction, and the vision is clear enough that we are sticking with it. An assistant that notices, proposes and prepares, with a person saying yes or no, is the shape we want every one of these tools to take. The organization question is the one that decides whether it becomes part of the business or stays a nice thing on the phone. Context has to live where we already keep it, and the output has to come back there.
The strategy will be similar for every tool in this category, whichever one you use. Decide where context lives, decide what the assistant may write and where, and keep the approval step in a place you will actually see it.
If you are using Claude Duet or one of the other proactive assistants in a small business, we would like to hear how you keep the output organized. What goes in a repository, what stays in OneDrive or SharePoint, and how does the assistant get it there? Tell us what is working.