Anthropic Says New Cowork Plugins Tailor Claude to Specific Job Functions

Anthropic added support for plugins to Cowork, the artificial intelligence-powered, hands-on collaborator that the company released earlier this month. The company made the feature available Friday (Jan. 30) as a research preview for paid users of its Claude AI platform, according to a Friday blog post. Together with Cowork, the new plugins enable users to tailor Claude to specific job functions by telling it how the user wants the work done, which tools and data to pull from, how to handle workflows, and what slash commands to expose to the user’s team, the post said. For example, a sales plugin could connect Claude to the user’s customer relationship management (CRM) system and knowledge base, teach it the user’s sales process, and provide commands for prospect research, sales follow-ups and other tasks, according to the post. “As your team builds and shares plugins, Claude becomes a cross-functional expert,” Anthropic said in the post. “The rich context you share gets baked into every relevant interaction, so leaders and admins can spend less time enforcing processes and more time improving them.” Anthropic open sourced 11 plugins that can be installed directly from Cowork, including productivity, enterprise search, plugin create/customize, sales, finance, data, legal, marketing, customer support, project management and biology research, according to the post. “Start with our open source collection, customize them or build something entirely new,” the company said in the post. Anthropic introduced Cowork on Jan. 12, saying this agentic experience enables Claude to read files, organize folders, draft documents…

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