Claude Cowork use cases
What Anthropic's documentation shows Cowork doing, and which plugins to add for each kind of work. Our directory lists 285 plugins.
Documented ways to use Cowork
Produce finished files
Anthropic lists polished documents, organized files, synthesized research, Excel spreadsheets with functional formulas, and PowerPoint presentations.
Hand off background work
Dispatch's own example: "Summarize the open Linear issues tagged reliability and draft a status update for the team channel." Knowledge work such as research, writing a document or organizing files runs in Cowork.
Keep recurring work in a project
A project keeps the folders, instructions, links and memory for an area of work you return to, so each session starts set up.
Automate websites
Pair Claude in Chrome with Cowork to automate tasks on any website.
Role workflows through plugins
Anthropic's example: a sales plugin can connect Claude to your CRM and knowledge base, teach it your sales process, and add slash commands from prospect research to call follow-ups.
Anthropic's official plugins, by job
Anthropic open-sourced 11 plugins it built and uses internally. Descriptions below are Anthropic's.
Productivity
Manage tasks, calendars, and daily workflows
Enterprise search
Find information across your company's tools and docs
Sales
Research prospects, prep deals, and follow your sales process
Finance
Analyze financials, build models, and track key metrics
Data
Query, visualize, and interpret datasets
Legal
Review documents, flag risks, and track compliance
Marketing
Draft content, plan campaigns, and manage launches
Customer support
Triage issues, draft responses, and surface solutions
Product management
Write specs, prioritize roadmaps, and track progress
Biology research
Search literature, analyze results, and plan experiments
Plugin Create
Create and customize new plugins from scratch
From install to first result
The path Anthropic documents is short: plugins need a paid Claude plan; you browse and install them from Customize > Plugins inside the app, and the plugin's skills are then available whenever you ask for that kind of work. Connectors inside a plugin ask for their own sign-in the first time. The full checklist is in plugin requirements, and how plugins, skills and connectors fit together in plugins vs skills vs connectors.
Picking by role? We maintain short guides for marketers, sales teams, consultants and freelancers.
Find more in our catalog
Community plugins cover more roles. See the best plugins by category, browse all 285, or learn how to start with Cowork.
Sources: Cowork overview, Run tasks in the background with Dispatch, Organize work with projects, Plugins overview.