What is Claude Cowork?
Earlier this month, Anthropic released Claude Cowork—a new feature that brings AI agent capabilities to everyday office work. If you've heard of Claude Code (the tool developers use to write software with AI assistance), think of Cowork as the equivalent for non-technical tasks: file organisation, document creation, data extraction, and administrative work.
Unlike a typical AI chatbot where you ask questions and get answers, Cowork actually does things on your computer. You grant it access to a specific folder, describe what you want to achieve, and Claude works through the task autonomously—creating files, organising documents, and looping you in on progress.
For small business owners who spend hours on administrative tasks that don't directly grow their business, this represents a genuine shift in what's possible.
Practical Use Cases for Small Businesses
The most immediately useful applications are the tedious tasks that consume time but don't require human judgement. Here are some concrete examples:
Expense tracking from receipts. Point Cowork at a folder of receipt photos and invoices, and it can read them, extract the relevant data, and create a structured expense spreadsheet. This is the kind of task many small business owners either spend hours on themselves or pay someone else to do.
File organisation. If your downloads folder or desktop has become a graveyard of unsorted documents, Cowork can scan file names and contents to group them into meaningful folders. What might take you an afternoon can be done while you focus on other work.
Document drafting from notes. If you have scattered notes, meeting summaries, and bullet points across various files, Cowork can pull them together into a coherent first draft. Not a finished document—that still needs your input—but a starting point that's far better than a blank page.
Data extraction and formatting. Need to pull specific information from a stack of PDFs into a spreadsheet? Or convert data from one format to another? These mechanical tasks are where Cowork excels.
Email triage. When paired with browser access, Cowork can scan your inbox and summarise which messages need immediate attention, helping you prioritise without reading through everything yourself.
How It Actually Works
Cowork runs within an isolated environment on your Mac (Windows support is coming but not yet available). You explicitly grant it access to specific folders—it can't see or touch anything you don't approve. Within those boundaries, it can read files, create new ones, edit existing documents, and work through multi-step tasks.
The workflow is straightforward: you describe what you want done, Claude makes a plan, and then executes it step by step while keeping you updated. If it encounters something ambiguous or needs a decision, it asks. This is genuinely different from a chatbot—you're delegating tasks, not having a conversation.
There's also integration with browser automation, meaning Cowork can complete tasks that require web access: checking dashboards, extracting data from online tools, or navigating web applications on your behalf.
The Cost Question
Cowork requires a Claude subscription. It's available on Pro plans ($20/month), though the more intensive usage is on Max plans ($100/month or more). For a small business, this is a meaningful expense that needs to justify itself.
The calculation is relatively simple: if Cowork saves you several hours per month on administrative tasks, the subscription pays for itself. If you're currently paying a bookkeeper, virtual assistant, or anyone else for tasks that Cowork can handle, the maths may work even more clearly in its favour.
That said, Cowork won't replace human judgement. It's excellent at mechanical, well-defined tasks. It's less suited to anything requiring context about your business relationships, strategic decisions, or creative work. The sweet spot is the tedious but necessary—exactly the work that small business owners often either neglect or resent.
Limitations to Consider
Cowork is still in research preview, which means it's not a finished product. There are genuine limitations to understand:
- macOS only for now. If you're a Windows user, you'll need to wait.
- File-based tasks are the core strength. It's not a general-purpose business automation tool.
- Learning curve in describing tasks clearly. Like any AI tool, you get better results when you're specific about what you want.
- Verification needed for important outputs. AI can make mistakes, so anything business-critical should be reviewed.
None of these are deal-breakers, but they're worth understanding before you commit time to learning a new tool.
Where This Fits in the Bigger Picture
Cowork represents a broader trend we've been tracking: AI moving from conversation to action. The first wave of AI tools answered questions. The current wave actually does things. This changes what's practical for small businesses to accomplish without expanding headcount.
As we've discussed in our piece on AI and custom ERP for small businesses, the economics of software and automation are shifting. Tools like Cowork are part of this shift—making capabilities that were previously only available to larger organisations accessible to smaller ones.
This isn't about AI replacing human work in any meaningful sense. It's about offloading the mechanical parts of work so humans can focus on the parts that actually require human judgement. For small business owners who are already stretched thin, that's a meaningful distinction.
Getting Started
If you want to try Cowork, you'll need the Claude desktop application on macOS and at least a Pro subscription. Start with a low-stakes task—organising a messy folder or extracting data from some receipts—to get a feel for how it works before trusting it with anything important.
The best approach is to think about the administrative tasks you currently dread or delay. Which of them are mechanical? Which don't really need your specific expertise, just your time? Those are the candidates for delegation to an AI assistant.
If you're curious about how AI tools like Cowork might fit into your broader business operations, or whether custom software might be a better long-term solution for your specific needs, we're happy to discuss that. Sometimes an off-the-shelf AI tool is exactly right. Sometimes it's a stepping stone toward something more tailored. The answer depends on your situation.