After 12+ years of building PHP applications, I recently added AI-powered features to a production Laravel dashboard — automatic report summaries generated from raw analytics data. What surprised me wasn't how hard it was. It was how little good PHP-focused content exists on this topic. Almost every LLM tutorial assumes you're writing Python.
So here's the guide I wish I had: integrating the Claude API and OpenAI API into a Laravel app, with a clean architecture you can actually ship to production.
What we'll build: a ReportSummaryService that takes raw data and returns a human-readable summary — with a driver pattern so you can switch between Claude and OpenAI with one config change.
Step 1: Get Your API Keys
Claude: Sign up at the Claude Console, generate a key under Account Settings.
