Founders and business leaders are putting Anthropic's agentic work tool, Claude Cowork, to creative use — managing schedules, organizing work, and holding themselves accountable to employees and investors.
Cowork was built by Anthropic engineering lead Felix Rieseberg, who also oversees Claude Code's integration into the Claude desktop app. The tool is currently desktop-only.
The idea emerged from an unexpected pattern Rieseberg noticed near the end of 2025: non-developers were increasingly turning to Claude Code not for software engineering, but for everyday knowledge work. He wanted to build something more accessible for those users — without the friction that typically comes with agentic tools.
The friction, in short, is this: AI agents need developer tools (devtools) to take actions on a computer, and most consumer machines don't come with them pre-installed. Rieseberg compares it to a contractor who shows up to a job site empty-handed. His solution was to give Claude its own miniature virtual computer. When a user sends Cowork a prompt, the agent spins up a virtual machine with devtools already installed, ready to work. A slightly adjusted system prompt also gives Cowork more explicit guidance for navigating browsers and third-party applications.
The result is an agent that can manipulate existing files, create new ones, and operate software on your behalf — cleaning up a spreadsheet, turning that data into a PowerPoint, then submitting the presentation through Chrome. Users control access by assigning each Cowork project to a specific folder and connecting it to external data sources like email, messaging platforms, and meeting transcripts.
An AI Chief of Staff
Stephanie Curcio, founder of patent search platform NL Patent, has organized her use of Cowork around distinct projects that serve as functional stand-ins for human roles. Her "chief of staff" project, connected to her email and Google Drive, delivers a daily morning briefing covering upcoming meetings and urgent requests. She instructed it to skip the flattery and act as a genuine sparring partner on business decisions.
A separate "editor in chief" project has access to her written materials and presentations and generates content that matches her voice. Additional projects handle legal agreement reviews and brand development.
A "Promise Layer" for Accountability
Rieseberg himself uses Cowork to manage his inbox and communications — including a running markdown file that tracks every commitment he's made to colleagues. "It's quite useful," he says, with characteristic understatement.
That instinct turns out to be well-founded. Recent research co-authored by William Mayew, a business administration professor at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, found that CEO promises can strengthen investor and stakeholder confidence, but also lock leaders into commitments that make later pivots or shortfalls reputationally expensive. The harder problem is that promises are made constantly and informally — in hallways, over Slack, in offhand meeting comments — and tracking them is genuinely hard.
Juan Pablo Ortega, founder of Yuno, a payments infrastructure company, has taken this further. Near the start of 2026, he connected Cowork to his meeting transcripts, notes, emails, and messaging platforms, then built what he calls a "promise layer." When Ortega commits to making an introduction in a meeting, Cowork processes the transcript, identifies the promise, and autonomously drafts the email. Each morning, Ortega reviews his drafts and sends the ones that look right.
The concept, notably, came from Claude itself. The first time Ortega used Cowork, he asked the agent what it could do for him — and together they developed the system. Within weeks, the promise file had grown large enough that Ortega set up a nightly recurring task to prune outdated entries and flag any promises more than three or four days old.
A Live Dashboard, Built on Demand
Cowork recently added the ability to build customized live dashboards. Users can simply describe what they want — emails flagged for urgent response, meeting briefs five minutes before a call — and Cowork builds the software. Rieseberg has used this to replace traditional reports, surfacing recommendations from user data about which Cowork features to invest in and which to retire. He also uses it to prep for sales calls: before pitching to a new client, he builds a hyper-personalized demo tailored to their specific needs, adjustable on the fly if a meeting runs long or short.
One More Thing: Interior Design
Rieseberg's most unexpected coworking use case has nothing to do with work. Preparing to move into a new house, he uploaded the floor plan and asked Cowork to build him a better planning tool. The agent turned it into an interactive 3D model — furniture movable, walls removable, room configurations swappable — like a bespoke version of The Sims.
Getting real value from Cowork, says Curcio, requires actual investment. "A lot of people are just barely scratching the surface," she says. Instructions help, but so does time: the back-and-forth that shapes how the tool learns to work with you specifically. It's not just about what you tell Claude to do. It's about the relationship you build with it.
Anthropic is no longer alone in this space. Since Cowork launched in January, OpenAI released Codex — its own agentic coding app for desktops — and is now working to make it more accessible to non-developers.