Ask Your Org: the query that crosses ten tools at once

A new hire asks you how to submit an expense report. You know the answer is in a Notion page somewhere, or maybe in the Google Drive folder someone shared in Slack last month, or maybe the finance team's Confluence space. You spend ten minutes finding it and twenty more pulling together the answer. This is exactly the work that Enterprise Search is designed to eliminate — for the new hire, for you, and for everyone else in the company who has asked the same question this month.

Enterprise Search is a dedicated "Ask {Your Org Name}" option in your Claude sidebar that finds and synthesises knowledge buried across your company's tools and data sources. Think of it as a pre-built Project for your entire organisation — your company's knowledge base is already loaded, your own credentials govern what you can see, and you can jump straight in with questions.

Enterprise Search is available on Claude for Work Enterprise (and Team) plans. If you are on a personal plan, this lesson is still useful — it shows you the shape of cross-source knowledge search, which you can approximate with regular connectors.

What Enterprise Search is for

The clearest way to understand Enterprise Search is to see the questions it is tuned for. These are the ones that normally cost you an afternoon of tab-switching.

Getting up to speed.

• "What happened yesterday while I was out?"
• "Summarise key updates across the business from the last week."
• "What are the current blockers on the Platform project?"

Policy and process questions.

• "What is our company's remote work policy?"
• "How do I submit an expense report?"
• "What's the process for requesting time off?"

Research and analysis.

• "What are the main reasons customers cite for choosing competitors?"
• "Summarise discussions about the Q4 product roadmap."
• "Find information about our customer onboarding process."

Onboarding new team members.

• "How does our authentication system work?"
• "Who should I talk to about learning the billing system?"
• "What tools does the engineering team use for deployment?"

Performance and project tracking.

• "Find discussions and documents related to the marketing campaign."
• "What were the key decisions from last week's leadership meetings?"
• "Summarise team contributions to the Infrastructure initiative."

The common shape is "this answer lives in three or four different places and nobody has put it in one document". When you ask Enterprise Search, Claude searches across your connected tools — SharePoint, Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Confluence, and so on — and synthesises a unified response with citations back to the original source.

Enterprise Search versus regular connectors. Regular chats with connectors can also pull from your tools — but Enterprise Search is specifically configured for information gathering, with custom instructions set by Anthropic to produce structured, cited answers. Use a regular chat when you want to take action (draft an email, create a ticket). Use Enterprise Search when you want to find and synthesise information across sources.

How the setup works

Enterprise Search is a two-step setup: first an admin configures it for the organisation, then individual users authenticate with their own accounts.

For admins (Owners)

Enterprise Search is enabled by default for Team and Enterprise organisations, but an Owner needs to complete the initial setup before team members can use it.

1. Click Ask Your Org in the left sidebar.
2. Click Set up for your org (or Disable if you do not want the feature).
3. Connect your organisation's tools. You are required to choose at least a Documents connector (Google Drive or SharePoint) and a Chat connector (Slack or Microsoft Teams). Email is recommended but optional. Click + Add more for any additional tools.
4. Customise the project name. Whatever you enter will appear as "Ask [Name]" in everyone's sidebar.
5. Add a description, then click Finish set up.

Once setup is complete, the project becomes available to all members of your organisation.

For users

After an admin has set up Enterprise Search, you will see the "Ask {Org Name}" project starred in your sidebar. To get started:

1. Click the project in your sidebar.
2. Follow the guided onboarding flow to connect to the recommended services.
3. Authenticate with each service you want to search — Slack, Google, Microsoft 365, and so on.
4. Start asking questions about your organisation's knowledge.

The more connectors you enable, the more comprehensive your results. You can always add more later from the Connect option in the project's Instructions section.

Is this safe?

Yes — and the model for why it is safe matters.

• You only see what you already have permission to see. Enterprise Search respects the access controls of the original tools. If you do not have access to the executive team's Drive folder, Enterprise Search cannot show you anything from it. Claude is not a backdoor around permissions; it is a better frontdoor through them.
• Your conversations stay private. Questions you ask in Enterprise Search are not shared with colleagues or used to train Claude.
• Your connected data is not re-indexed or stored separately. Claude queries the live sources at the moment you ask — it is not building a second copy of your company's knowledge somewhere.

The short version: Enterprise Search lets each person work faster with what they already have access to, without expanding what anyone can reach. That is what makes it safe to deploy broadly.

When to reach for it

Use Enterprise Search when:

• The answer almost certainly exists somewhere in your company's tools, but you do not know exactly where.
• The question would require you to search three or more sources manually.
• You want a synthesised answer with citations rather than a list of links.
• You are onboarding and you do not yet know who to ask.

Use a regular chat with connectors when:

• You want to do something, not just find something — draft an email, create a ticket, update a record.
• You already know which single tool the answer is in.
• You need Claude to combine internal data with external research (that is what Research mode is for — the next lesson).

Before you move on

Think about the three questions a new hire on your team always asks. Those are your first Enterprise Search prompts.