Private plugin marketplaces, monitoring tools, orchestration between Excel and PowerPoint: Anthropic muscle Claude Cowork to attract businesses.
It’s the logical next step in Anthropic’s quest to automate white-collar jobs. The San Francisco start-up unveiled on February 24 a major update to Claude Cowork, its agent platform dedicated to businesses. Private plugin marketplaces, new agents specialized by profession and a first orchestration brick between Office applications. The ambition is to make Claude no longer a simple conversational assistant, but an agent platform to gradually automate all sectors of the company.
Plugins, to create agents by profession
The main new feature lies in the possibility of creating plugins business by business. Plugins are, in reality, enriched skills designed for automating computer tasks. They only work in the Claude Desktop application, on Mac and Windows. Concretely, a plugin combines instructions specific to a profession, predefined commands in the form of slashes, and MCP connectors to the majority of digital workplace platforms (Slack, Canva, Notion, Monday, Drive, Gmail, etc.). Business account administrators can create them from scratch or from templates, with Claude guiding the configuration step by step.
At the same time, Anthropic is launching around ten ready-to-use plugins, each designed with employees of the relevant profession.
- The plugin HR covers writing job offers, creating onboarding plans, performance evaluations and compensation analysis.
- The one dedicated to design helps produce structured feedback on models, write interface texts, check accessibility and organize user testing sessions.
- There finance is the most comprehensive vertical with five distinct plugins: financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity and wealth management.
Several business cases can be directly automated with Cowork plugins. For example :
- A sales manager can ask Cowork to prepare a brief before a client meeting by cross-referencing CRM data, the latest email exchanges in Gmail and recent news from the target company.
- A project manager can launch a command (/) to transform the notes of a Teams meeting into a structured report, then dispatch the actions in Monday or Asana, all automatically in total autonomy.
- A store manager can ask Claude to analyze his sales for the week in his Excel spreadsheet, identify out-of-stock products and automatically write supplier orders by email.
Orchestration between Excel and PowerPoint and new connectors
Another new feature, Claude can now chain tasks between Excel and PowerPoint by switching the context from one application to another. In short, it becomes possible to ask Claude to carry out an analysis in an Excel spreadsheet, then to automatically generate the corresponding PowerPoint presentation, without manual intervention between the two steps.
On the connector side, Anthropic is also expanding its catalog with Google Workspace (Calendar, Drive, Gmail), Docusign, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, Similarweb, MSCI, LegalZoom, FactSet, WordPress and Harvey.
On governance, Anthropic adds support for OpenTelemetry to allow administrators to monitor the usage and costs of deployed agents in real time. It is also now possible to provision per user, self-install plugins and use GitHub repositories as a source of plugins (in private beta).
Pricing
The plugins and Cowork are accessible from the Pro plan (20 euros per month), but it is from the Team (25 euros per user per month) and Enterprise plans that the deployment features (provisioning, auto-install, etc.) are available. Finally, orchestration between Excel and PowerPoint requires at least the Max plan (from 100 euros per month).
While the market has not yet fully reacted to this type of announcement, the direction is clear. The implicit final promise is clear: more added value per employee, which ultimately means fewer employees for the same level of production.
