Anthropic Upgrades Claude Cowork to Supercharge Everyday Office Productivity

Anthropic is turning its AI from a chatty sidekick into a full-blown office manager.

On Tuesday, Anthropic announced a new set of updates to Claude Cowork, its AI productivity platform, pushing it further into the heart of enterprise software. The company says the new features are designed to help businesses tailor Claude to their internal workflows, departments, and tools, moving beyond chatbot-style assistance toward something closer to a digital teammate.

“Today, we’re introducing updates to Cowork and plugins that help enterprises customize Claude to how you work,” the company said in a blog post. “Plugins turn Claude into specialized agents for every role and department. Now, you can build private marketplaces to distribute them across your organization.”

A private marketplace for your office

The biggest change is how companies can customize Claude. Admins can now build their own private “plugin marketplaces.” This means a company can create specialized versions of Claude that follow their specific rules and workflows.

Instead of a generic AI, you can have a “Claude for Legal” or a “Claude for HR” that knows exactly how your specific company handles paperwork. Anthropic is also making it easier to build these tools with a new “Customize” menu that guides users through the setup by asking simple questions.

New connectors across popular office tools

Claude Cowork is also expanding its reach into widely used business software. 

Anthropic confirmed new connectors for tools, including Google Workspace (Drive, Gmail, Calendar), DocuSign, FactSet, WordPress, LegalZoom, MSCI, Similarweb, and others. These connectors allow Claude to pull context directly from workplace systems, rather than relying solely on what users type in a chat window.

In addition, companies including Slack by Salesforce, LSEG, S&P Global, Apollo, Common Room, and Tribe AI have built plugins for joint customers.

Anthropic is also expanding its library of ready-made plugin templates. These span departments such as HR, design, engineering, operations, financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management.

Each template is designed around real-world workflows, for example, drafting onboarding plans in HR, generating deploy checklists in engineering, or building financial models and PowerPoint templates for analysts. In Anthropic’s words, plugins are “simple, portable file systems that you own,” and they can work across Cowork and tools built on the Claude Agent SDK.

Claude can now work across Excel and PowerPoint

In what might be the most practical update for office workers, Anthropic says Claude can now handle multi-step projects across Excel and PowerPoint, passing context between the two. That means a user could ask Claude to run an analysis in Excel and then turn that analysis into a presentation, without restarting or re-explaining the task.

What’s available and when

The updates start rolling out on Tuesday. All user experience improvements for plugins are available to all Cowork users, while team and enterprise admins get access to company branding, provisioning, and MCP controls. 

The Excel-PowerPoint integration is available in research preview for all paid plans on Mac and Windows. Users need to download the Claude add-ins for both applications to get started.

Also read: Anthropic says Claude Sonnet 4.6 is built for the “age of agents.”

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