Claude Cowork is Claude’s desktop app, and it can read the files on your computer. Your downloads, your PDFs, your folders. Point it at those and it drafts the email itself.
What is Claude Cowork used for?
The web chat answers questions. Cowork does jobs, because the material a job needs is sitting on the machine it is running on. Send the customer the revised quote. Read the three supplier PDFs in downloads and tell me who is cheapest on labour. Write the follow-up to the survey we did on Tuesday, using the notes in that folder.
Every one of those is a job you already do, and the only reason the chat box could not do it was that you would have had to paste the material in first.
How do you get Claude Cowork?
You download the app. It opens looking close to the web interface you already know, with your chats down the left and a message box in the middle. The first thing it asks for is what makes it different: access to your file system, so it can go through your downloads and your folders.
Which subscription tier includes it, and what that costs, is the one thing this lesson will not tell you. Anthropic’s own pricing page is the only place that answer stays current, and a number typed into an article ages badly.
What can Claude Cowork do that the web chat cannot?
Six surfaces sit on top of the chat window, and you will use two of them in week one.
| Surface | What it does | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | Groups chats into separate context windows | Marketing campaigns live in one project, finance records in another |
| Artifacts | Reusable assets, often built as code | Your pricing has too many rules to hold in your head |
| Scheduled tasks | Runs a session at a set time of day | You want yesterday’s emails summarised at 6am, before you get in |
| Dispatch (beta) | Starts work on your computer from your phone | The proposal is on your desktop and you are on site |
| Customisations | Adds skills, capabilities and connectors | You want Cowork to follow your process |
| Design | Builds marketing assets, PDFs and slides | The same session that wrote the quote should lay out the deck |
Projects are the first thing to set up. Each one holds a completely different context window, so a question asked inside the finance project is answered against finance material and nothing else. Keep everything in a single project and every answer is drawn from everything you have ever put in there.
Say your pricing has enough rules in it that nobody but you can quote a job. Build the calculator once inside Cowork and save it. Next month you open the same artifact and run it against a different customer’s numbers, and the month after that against a proposal. Artifacts are usually built as code, and they are the part of a session you keep.
A scheduled task is a session you start in the future. Set one for 6am: it reads the previous day’s emails, summarises them, and does it again at 6am tomorrow, so the summary is waiting when you get into the office. You are giving Claude permission to run at a specific time with you asleep.
Dispatch runs on your phone and acts on your desktop. The file is on your desk and you are not, so you tell Claude from your phone to open it and send the proposal. I have barely touched it, and the reason is what has to be true for it to work: a session your phone triggers, taking actions on the machine that holds your customer files and your accounts, with nobody watching the screen while it does. It is still in beta. Leave it until the rest of this is boring.
Customisations and design each get their own lesson. Customisations covers new skills, new capabilities and new connectors, which is how the app learns the way you already work. Design covers marketing assets, PDFs and slides built inside Cowork, and it is the next lesson in this track.
Claude Cowork vs Claude Code: which one do you need?
Claude Code came first, and it existed because software engineers needed a way to hand the model their codebase. Cowork is the same move aimed at the person who runs the business. Your context is a folder of supplier quotes, a spreadsheet of service contracts, last quarter’s invoices, and an inbox nobody has read properly since last week.
| Claude Code | Claude Cowork | |
|---|---|---|
| Points at | A codebase | The files on your computer |
| Runs in | Terminal, VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains, the desktop app, the browser | The desktop app |
| Built for | Someone writing software | Someone running the business |
| Starts with | A typed command in a folder | Downloading an app |
Underneath, it is the same thing wrapped in a friendlier, non-technical package. Claude Code is worth learning if the work you want done is software. For the quotes, invoices, proposals and inbox, Cowork is the one to open.
Is Claude Cowork worth it for a small business?
For most owners getting into AI, this is where we tell them to start. Cowork is a long way off the most advanced thing you can run. Agents that work in the background without being asked take far more setup, and far more thought about what they are allowed to touch. Cowork sits one level above a chatbot, and it is a level you can reach on a Tuesday afternoon.
The first move is small. Pick one folder you know the contents of, put it in a project, and give the model a job you already know the answer to. You are checking whether it reads your files the way you read them.
