Anthropic accelerates its Cowork enterprise play

When it’s not distracted by negotiations with the Pentagon, Anthropic’s focus has long been on the enterprise. On Tuesday, it launched a set of new connectors and plugins for its business users that should make it easier for those companies to get value from Claude and Claude Cowork.

Connecting Excel and PowerPoint

The most interesting update — and one that many Office workers should be able to make good use of right away — may be about how Claude can now connect workflows between two software stalwarts: Excel and PowerPoint. Anthropic already offered add-ins for both, but now the two can talk to each other. That means an analyst could, for example, move data from Excel directly into a PowerPoint slide, and since the agent is now aware of the context of both applications, it can handle larger projects, too.

This feature is now available for Mac and Windows users with Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.

Cowork gets enterprise-ready

Unlike some of the company’s competitors, Anthropic has always kept its focus on business use cases. But to get the most out of a tool like Claude, without moving to a third-party agent platform, Anthropic needs to offer as many integrations as possible, which may explain why it invented the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for connecting large language models (LLMs) to third-party tools and data sources, too.

Plugins for Cowork launched in late January of this year, but, as with other Claude-related tools, Anthropic has set a rather relentless pace for its release schedule.

Today’s update brings an improved plugin experience to Cowork and expands its existing plugin and connector ecosystem with more first- and third-party tools.

The new connectors available now are Google Drive, Google Calendar, Gmail, DocuSign, Apollo (the sales intelligence platform, not the private equity firm), Clay, Outreach, Similarweb, MSCI, LegalZoom, FactSet, WordPress, and Harvey.

Credit: Anthropic.

As for the plugins, Anthropic notes that it worked with partners like FactSet, S&P, and LSEG to add a plugin for equity research, for example, that can help analysts parse earnings transcripts and update their financial models with new guidance.

Other new financial services plugins include an analysis plugin that covers market and competitive research, for example, and a plugin for investment bankers to speed up deal document production.

There are also new plugins for HR teams, designers, engineers, and operations teams, as well as a new brand voice plugin built by Tribe AI that ensures brand standards and tone stay on track.

Those plugins are all open source, easy to modify and build upon, and basically just connections to human-readable, editable Markdown files.

Across the Claude ecosystem, plugins typically are bundles of skills, agents, hooks, and MCP servers, and installing them is as easy as uploading a file to Claude or pointing Cowork to the directory where those files live. Cowork, it is worth noting, has only had plugin support for the last few weeks.

Anthropic notes that it has also made the overall setup experience a bit easier because all plugins, skills, and connectors now sit in a unified ‘Customize’ menu in the Claude desktop app.

More tools for admins

Going forward, enterprise admins will also have more tools to provision these plugins for their users through a new private plugin marketplace. Those admins will also now be able to build plugins from starter templates or from scratch, with Claude guiding them along the way.

For those who want more metrics, Anthropic is launching support for the open-source observability framework OpenTelemetry, so admins can track usage, costs, and tool activity.

As a bonus, admins can also now customize Cowork with their company’s logo.

Before joining The New Stack as its senior editor for AI, Frederic was the enterprise editor at TechCrunch, where he covered everything from the rise of the cloud and the earliest days of Kubernetes to the advent of quantum computing….

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