Last Friday I had coffee with an old colleague who's working as the COO for another business. Their internal operations are a bit of a mess and he’s cleaning things up. They can’t turn proposals around quickly enough with prospective clients after sales meetings and invoices take forever to prepare so cash flow is an issue.
“Have you heard of Claude Cowork?” I asked and of course the answer was no. No one has. At least not yet.
What Claude Cowork Did
Claude Cowork made it easy for me to show people the power of AI. There’s no hooking up to Github or downloading Node.js to your computer and no opening the terrifying Terminal app.
You just sign up for the $20/month Claude plan, download the latest version of the Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows, and go to the Cowork tab.
Now I can make any process in your company into a skill or plugin that Cowork can execute. A skill is just a file with a prompt for Claude. It’s a set of instructions that Claude can read. Plugins are groups of skills. Instructions for how to create a financial dashboard would be a skill and the entire set of processes you use to run your finance function would be a plugin.
Skills and plugins become really powerful when you use connectors to other software vendors. Claude can connect to your email, your CRM, your Calendar, and your Quickbooks. Depending on what permissions you give it, it can automate entire processes.
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How It Works
Here’s an example. When your books are closed each month, you open Claude Cowork, use the plus sign at the bottom left of the chat box to connect to the financials folder on your desktop. It’s synced with your Google Drive or Sharepoint. You type “/financial dashboard".
Claude Cowork can now operate in that file. It will open a file in that folder called Skill.md that contains all the relevant skills for that process. If you’ve preconfigured the connector to Quickbooks, it can log in as you, download that month’s Profit and Loss and Cash Flow statements and the Balance Sheet.
Then Claude reads the next step from the skill file telling it how to build the dashboard. Anthropic (which makes Claude) has built a lot of plugins and skills for you. In the attached video I show you how to use their financial analysis plugin to build a dashboard using data from a fictional company called Solder Consulting.
How We Are Using It
At OwnerRx we’ve built 36 skills to help run the company. We have 8 more to go under the current plan. When we are finished, we’ll have made every process in our company executable by Claude Cowork or its more capable cousin, Claude Code.
Those aren’t all automated. We trigger them and Claude asks us questions or for approvals based on how we set up the process. It feels more like working with a capable colleague rather than automation.
We’ve stopped using a lot of other software. I don’t open PowerPoint, Excel, or Word anymore. Claude will save things in those formats if we need to share them outside but opening Word just feels clunky now.
Right now, I’m using Canva to build a graphic to show all the processes we’ve turned into skills for next week’s newsletter. I just connected Canva to Claude, which sends the requests out to Canva and returns the results right back into my Claude session.
What This Means
Cowork is a new product so it has glitches. It’s slow, particularly on Windows, but Cowork, or something very similar to it, is the future of work. It turns what used to be dead SOPs and policies into executable functions. All that knowledge that used to live in people’s heads? That’s all in plugins and skills now that you as the business owner have documented and own.
Once you start working this way everything speeds up. What took days takes minutes. What felt made up and inconsistent is repeatable and scalable.
That colleague of mine with the proposal and invoicing issues? A few days of work documenting how they want the process to go in skills and some training will turn a weeks long stressful slog into something that takes minutes and works like magic.
When I see the gap between what companies are doing and what they could be doing with Cowork is immense and the opportunity to get ahead of the pack is large.
When I see what companies could be doing with AI but aren’t, I’m reminded of Lenin’s quote about the October Revolution.
“Power was lying in the street. We picked it up.”
The power of AI is lying in the street. Are you going to pick it up?
Alan
PS Want to learn AI for yourself? Join the 40 other owners, just like you, who have taken the AI challenge in our next AI for Business Owners Cohort starting April 13th. Sign up today and secure a 27% discount.
Here’s a quote from the last Cohort that made it all worth it to me: “I’ll tell you that your course has been way more influential than that … it’s honestly changing our entire business and how we think about work.”