By Shannon Glennon, AI Technology Transformation Specialist, Syracuse University ITS
AI tools move fast! If you tried Claude back in the winter and haven’t checked in since, here’s what’s changed.
- It Remembers You
Claude used to start fresh for each conversation. You’d explain your role, your preferences and your project context repeatedly. As of March 2026, Claude carries context across separate chats automatically, including your name, your writing style and the projects you’re working on. You can view every stored memory, edit it or clear it out entirely by going to claude.ai > Settings > Memory.
- It Can Read Much More at Once
Claude can now hold roughly a million tokens of context in a single conversation. In practical terms, that means you can hand Claude an entire semester’s worth of course documents, a full contract or months of meeting notes and it can work with all of it at the same time instead of losing track partway through. There’s no setting to turn on here; it’s automatic on supported models.
- It Lives Inside Excel, PowerPoint and Word
Claude’s add-ins for Microsoft 365 apps rolled out across the spring of 2026. Word joined in April, and Excel and PowerPoint reached full availability in May. Instead of copying data back and forth, you can now build pivot tables, charts and formulas in Excel, generate and edit slides in PowerPoint, or draft and revise documents in Word, all with Claude working directly inside the file. You’ll find it on the Home tab, at the far right of the ribbon. It should be there by default, but if it’s not showing up, go to Home > Add-ins (or Get Add-ins) and select/search for Claude by Anthropic.
- It Became Noticeably Smarter
Anthropic released a new generation of models this year, including Claude Opus 5 and Claude Sonnet 5, with meaningfully better reasoning, writing quality and follow-through on multistep requests. If you tried Claude months ago and found it fell short on a complex task, it’s worth trying again. You can see and switch between available models by clicking the model name at the bottom of the chat window.
- Claude in Chrome
Claude in Chrome is a browser extension that adds a Claude side panel to the right of the page you’re viewing. It can see the page and act on it. It reads, clicks, types, navigates and fills out forms, so you get help without leaving your browser. To try it, open Chrome, install the “Claude for Chrome” extension from the Chrome Web Store, sign in using your NetID, then click the Claude icon in your toolbar to open the side panel. Claude will ask permission before acting on a site the first time, so review what it’s about to do before approving.
Worth a Second Look
If your first impression of Claude is a few months old, it’s a different tool now. Open a new conversation and try something you gave up on before. There’s a good chance it handles it now!
To learn more about generative AI resources available at Syracuse University, visit ai.syracuse.edu.