Claude Cowork: The AI That Has Wall Street’s Attention

Welcome, welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Ben Mills, and welcome to our first Power Lunch where we're going to be talking about Claude Cowork. Just a few housekeeping things. If you could drop your name into our comments and where you're dialing in from. And you'll also notice there's a Google Sheet where we're collecting information as we build our AI community. We welcome you to drop in your email and your name and any questions that you might have on Claude Claude, Cowork, or any AI questions in general. Please just drop them in there. One thing I'd like to also mention at the beginning is this presentation is for informational purposes only, and participants are responsible for conducting their own independent assessment before adopting or relying on any AI tools or recommendations discussed. Attendees should carefully review each AI provider's confidentiality, data security, and privacy policies to ensure compliance with the organization's legal and regulatory requirements. And now let's get started on cloud co-work. I'm going to turn it over to my partner, Ary, to get us going.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ben. Welcome everyone. We would love for you to add your name, email in the, in the comments. And we have a document there that we've put the link in the comments for you to network. Add your name, your email, your industry, and promote your business. This is a way to start building our community and networking. And if you could say hi in the comments, remember, we can't see you. We would love to see who's here. Just put your name in the comments. Say hello. Hi, Steve. How are you? Nice to meet you. We have Steve Fallon. Anyone else? Put your name in the comments. Say hello. Wave so that we know you are out there. We only have 30 minutes today, so we are going to dive right in. And so just to introduce myself, my name is Ary Aranguiz. I'm an AI implementation strategist. I'm also a certified professional in talent development and an AI project manager. All right, let's get started. So what is Claude Cowork? So Claude Cowork is an AI desktop agent. It works alongside with you. It is different from ChatGPT and Claude AI in the sense that it will actually do the actual prompts for you or actual work for you. It will read your files, it will create all different types of documents, spreadsheets, SOPs, presentations, PowerPoints, And it will also organize your files. It can multitask and handle all different types of complex projects simultaneously. And all you have to do is use plain English, just describe what you need. And it has what's called transparent reasoning, which means that as it's performing the task, it will generate a to-do list for itself. And we'll take a look at that in just a second. Hey Javier, nice to see you. And Allison, Olga, nice to see you. Karen, awesome. Please drop your name in the chat as you're coming in and we will get started. And also remember, if you're just joining us, don't worry, this is going to be recorded. It'll show up on your feed, so no worries if you're just stopping in. All right, let's continue. So Claude Cowork is powered by Anthropic Opus 4.6. It is Anthropic's most capable AI model, and it has a 1 million token context window. What does that mean? It means that it can see and work with an enormous amount of information. It is also ranking number 1 in terms of coding benchmarks. What that means is that this is a tool that when it's been tested, when experts have tested it with difficult programming problems, it always solves them correctly the majority of the time. Ben, I'll turn it over to you to talk about it.

It also has built-in agent teams. When you think of an agent, I want you to think of like an AI person that can handle a lot of your daily tasks that you might have when you're working. and doing your job as well as some of your personal tasks at the same time.

Awesome. And I see some more people coming in. Christoph, so nice to see you. Tina from the UK, awesome. As you come in, please put your name in the chat and say hello so that we know you're out there. And also, we have just a reminder, we have that Google Sheet that, um, we have created for you to network. Put your email, put your questions as well. We're not going to have time to answer all your questions, So put your questions in there and your information so you can network as well. Okay, so continuing on. So you may have heard of Claude Code. Claude Code is for developers, and we will have future Lunch and Learns about Claude Code. And also in our community, we are going to have courses about that. Today's focus is Claude Cowork. It is a visual desktop. No coding is required. Claude Cowork is for everybody else, for non-technical folks. It will have designated folder access. And as I mentioned, it can create docs, decks, spreadsheets. It is currently in research preview and basically in beta, and it is available to macOS. Windows is coming soon.

Real quick, like with all AI tools, you should always monitor the data security involved. You should always review The AI platform security and confidentiality, uh, Claude Cowork is no different, but they are building a lot of systems to provide more data security and more privacy of the information.

So how is Claude Cowork a game changer for everyone, not just SMBs, but for small to medium businesses, but for everyone? It is going to save you hours every week. You can automate reports, you can organize files, it can do data entry for you through its Chrome extension. Again, that's another Lunch and Learn coming up very soon. It can create all kinds of documents for you. The team becomes— Claude Cowork becomes your team. You have instant productivity in minutes just with plain language. The PowerPoint that you're seeing, the presentation that you are seeing right now, we intentionally use Claude Cowork to demonstrate its power. This presentation was created from start to finish with— this was the first iteration just with one prompt and we described what we needed and it created what you're seeing right now. The best way to demo its power is to demonstrate the output here. Now imagine being able to have all these different plugins across all these different business functions in sales, marketing, finance, support, data analysis. Imagine being able to have a performance coach that analyzes your, your, uh, your sales data and be able to visualize that for stakeholders, for different type of stakeholder audiences, and create an interactive dashboard. It can do that. Imagine also being able to build a custom governance agent where you upload all of your governance or compliance policies, and then everything that you create, you can test it against the, the data that you've uploaded there. Now, in the legal industry, and I'll let, uh, Ben talk more also about the finance and legal industry, you It is taking it by storm because of billable hours. So I'll let Ben talk about that.

So they're finding in the legal community that Claude Cowork is able to analyze complex transactions, complex documents, and people are looking for lower billing rates, lower fees. They're noticing in the accounting profession, it can do a lot more research, a lot more consulting projects a lot faster, and it's revolutionizing the industries. Because it's done in seconds, if not minutes, compared to hours and hours and hours of time.

Yep, absolutely. So I see some comments here. Can it analyze Excel row data and merge similar content into single rows? Now that is beyond the scope of this training, but yes, it can analyze your data. We will— we won't be able to demo that specific use case, but it can perform all types of data analysis. So please put that question in the Google Sheet and we'll follow up with you as well. Um, and I see startup CTO looking for new tools. This is an excellent tool for you to try out as well. And again, the Google Sheet, um, I have put the link in the chat. Let me put it in the chat again. And please let me know, you can give me a thumbs up if you can see it there. Just give me a thumbs up if you have access there. And it has Public access.

To give you an idea of the power of Claude Cowork, it was launched on January 12th. And on February 5th, there was a SaaSpocalypse with the market, market values, a lot of SaaS companies went down by $285 billion. This was within 2 weeks of just rolling out the Claude Cowork and the power that it can now do. that so many companies and individuals were paying third-party providers to analyze data and collect information. Cloud co-work is now at your fingertips and you can do it right from your desktop.

Yep, that's right. A comment in the chat here, have you ever seen it not work? What's your experience in governance and managing output? Great question. Remember that it is still in research preview. One of the things we will be talking about in the weeks to come is the Chrome extension. That is still, in my experience, quite glitchy. However, imagine this is in research preview and it is so powerful right now. Imagine in a few months from now what its capabilities will be. Let's go ahead and get started. Enough talk, and I want to show you the tool in action. This is a deck that if you send us your email, put the email in the Google Sheet and we will share the deck with you. This deck has a lot of different information. Claude Code, we're not going to cover that today. What Claude in Chrome is or what the extension is. There are a series of products from Anthropic, not just Claude Cowork, And this deck provides all different kinds of resources for you. So please share your email with us and we will, we will share it with you. The link to the sheet is not showing in the comments. Okay. So if you email us, please email us at theairadybusiness@gmail.com. And we will share that with you. Okay, this is our first time using StreamYard, so bear with us. All right, so, and if you're just joining us, please say hello in the comments so we know you're there. All right, so let's talk about— let's take a look at the tool in action. So this is Claude Cowork, and I'm going to be turning my face this way, so don't mind me there. So the first thing I'm going to show you is its capability for organizing your files. And if you notice here at the bottom, it'll say Work in a Folder. If you click on that, you'll see that it is connected to my computer files. So you'll see my Drive there, my Desktop, Downloads, Documents. So I have in the past organized my documents. It's tidied up everything very nicely. And I'm going to show you just in the interest of time here what it was able to do. So by clicking that button, by, by clicking Work in a Folder and then selecting the folder that I wanted it to organize, and I said, for example, organize my folders, my desktop, my downloads, It asked me a series of questions. How do I want to organize these files? By file type? Do I want to move the files? And then it identifies all of the different files by— and generates the folder. So it took over 3,000 files that I had loose and it put them into 7 folders and it created the folders for me. So that is just one of many powerful things that it can do. Now, another thing that I want to point out, when I mentioned the, the task, the transparency, it will show you the task that it's carrying out as it's, as it's performing the operation. So it'll create a to-do list for itself. And as it performs the different tasks, it crosses them out. Okay. So now what I want to show you is a marketing task. So I'm going to come back here to new task, and if you look here at the plus sign and you see plugins, here are the different agents or plugins and across different business functions. So one of the ones that I used was for marketing, and you could see here what's called commands. So commands are the different prompts, and you could do a brand review. So for example, you can take your website link, you can click this, do brand review, add your website link, and it will audit your website or whatever assets or whatever it is that you want a review on. It will do that for you. Um, let me go back to my example here. So one of the things that I did is I took my uh, LinkedIn performance data on my content. I'm trying to build my audience on LinkedIn, my presence. So I was able to go to my impressions, those analytics I downloaded from LinkedIn. I downloaded that information and I uploaded it and I selected performance report and it created a marketing performance report. Um, it again, it asks you a series of questions And it was just for one week. At first, I wanted it to provide the information as a template because I wanted to see what that— what type of data, um, it— the, the structure, the format. And you could see it here, and it will take a few minutes. So it has, uh, the structure is an executive summary, key metrics, for example, page re— page views, unique visitors, our average time on page. And so once I was satisfied with the type of information it was going to give me, I went ahead and asked it create the, the marketing performance report using my LinkedIn data. And there it is. So I'm going to show you what it provided, and it gave me a pretty detailed, um, audit of my performance. On all of my, uh, LinkedIn posts for 1 week. You could do it for the year, you could do it for, uh, whatever time frame you want. And here is the comprehensive report. It took about, I would say, 4 minutes, 5 minutes to do this. That's why we're not doing it live. But I would love for you try it and report back, share back with us, reach out and let us know. So here is the daily performance breakdown, top post So by identifying this, I could go back and see what my top posts were and replicate that. Uh, gave me audience demographics, more insights, uh, what worked, what needs improvement. And what I did then, I took it a step further and I selected the campaign planning. And so I asked it to generate a campaign to generate leads over the next 2 weeks. And then it was able to create this campaign here with a detailed outline, step by step, of what I need to do to increase, uh, performance on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn generation campaign, the core messaging that I need. So imagine the value of this kind of report. This is something that if you were to work with a brand strategist, a marketer, they would spend probably months, uh, and a lot of billable hours, very expensive. So notice now for the next 2 weeks I've got myself a content calendar. Um, it tells me what time to post, uh, what to track, what kind of metrics to track, the lead market strategy. So For a new entrepreneur, this is excellent. Daily engagement checklist to follow, and so on and so forth. So moving on. So one of the things that you have probably seen a lot of people do is you see those 30-second, 60-second clips on Instagram and on LinkedIn, on social media, where people are promoting their business and their services. You can take a webinar, you can take any video, and rather than use the software that is available to us to do this, you can now use Claude Code. That saves you one subscription right there. You could put that video. What I did was this was a meeting that I had and I uploaded the MP4, I uploaded the video, and I asked it to break it into 30-second segments. It told me that it was too, that it would be too many clips. So I said, okay, do the first 5 minutes. And here are the clips, um, that it created. So again, saves— that saved me tons of money, tons of time, and it helps me with creating content. So these are marketing examples, but we're going to go into some sales examples actually right now. And, um, Matthew, nice to see you too. Um, also anyone else that's joined us, please say hello in the comments. So that we know that you're out there, and any questions that you have, put them in the comments. All right. So here is another example for sales. So I'm gonna bring up again. Let me go here to the plugins. So for sales, one of the things that I did is I created a this was a call, a client call that I had. And all of us, or the majority of us, are now using, uh, recorders on Zoom. On— we use Otter or Fathom. You could take the transcripts of the calls, put them in here, and then do a call summary. You can select here with plugins, you can select call summary, and there's all these different types of, um, business functions for, for sales. We'll talk about that more in a minute. But I selected call summary. It, um, it gave me the, the key points. Um, imagine using this for coaching for, um, for yourself or for a team to see what's going right during those sales calls, what needs improvement, potential opportunities. Gave me action items here, next steps, and it even created a follow-up email draft that I could use, and I could literally just copy it and send it. Now I took it a step further and I asked it to create a proposal based on that, and it created this interactive proposal, um, that I could either convert as a PDF and send it to the client or make it interactive, make it a landing page, and send it to, to the potential client. Also notice I made it a template just for anonymizing the information here, but I could add my branding guidelines. I could attach them here, add my branding guidelines, and then ask it. This was the first iteration. Everything that you're seeing is the first iteration of everything. And I could add my branding guidelines and it would add my logo and my brand colors. The presentation you saw at the beginning, I did that. I added my brand guidelines before I started. I see, how does this differ from the summary Zoom or Otter provides? It's more comprehensive. And you can, as I said, you can create a proposal from it. You can create all different kinds of additional assets from that. For example, an email sequence. So that is probably a good time now To talk about—

you want to talk about the connectors? So you also have the Claude Cowork also have connectors. So I'm sure everybody's had times where you're trying to find a document in your email, you're trying to— you can't remember who sent it to you. Claude Cowork now can go into your email and find the document for you, even if it was 6 months ago, 10,000 emails ago. It'll find the email, find the document that you're looking for. Within seconds, and it saves time doing all the searches by person, by subject, by date. This will just do it for you instantly.

Yep. And in future Lunch and Learns, we will demo that as well, how to use the connectors. So, um, one thing I want to point out, if you go here to Plugins and you go to Manage Plugins, These are the agents basically across different business functions, and these are the default prompts or commands. So again, for marketing, you can draft a blog post for SEO optimization, you can audit your website for AEO or GEO optimization using these different prompts. But let's say you didn't like some of these. What you can do is you can browse plugins. So think of this as Um, on the App Store, you can, um, browse for different apps. Same thing with plugins. If some of the default commands or prompts don't suit you, you want to perform a different operation, you can come in here, browse in the GitHub Store, and find the plugin that you need. Or you can actually create your own customized plugin for whatever operation you need for your business. Okay, and, um, let me point out here the finance one.

Um, there's also a finance plugin that, that you're bringing up, and that can do, uh, financial analysis. It can help you prepare your bank reconciliations, record journal entries. It can do variance analysis on your historical information. It can help you prepare forecasts and budgets, all at your fingertips with, uh, CoWork. Um, and it's done it instantly and fast.

Yep, that's right. And as you can see here, when, um, when you hover over, it gives you— it shows you what the prompts are. So I definitely recommend that you, um, you know, explore these. Now I'm going to show you one last, uh, use case here, visualization. So again, taking as an example, but I want you to envision what kind of data you could use instead. Remember, making sure that the data is not any kind of sensitive data or anything like that. But imagine taking some data and using the data visualization plugin, which is here. You can analyze your data, you can build a dashboard, create visualization, explore it, validate it, all kinds of things. So what I did is I asked it to do a data visualization, and it created this interactive dashboard for my LinkedIn, for my LinkedIn data. So imagine presenting this. This could be a PDF, this could be an interactive dashboard for different stakeholders. You can mix it up for different stakeholder audiences. But this is just a, you know, scratching the surface of—

This is any data. It's any data.

Yep, that's right. That's right. So with that, we are going to stop here. We hope to do more of these Uh, every Wednesday we will be here. We want to hear from you. Reach out to us, uh, the AI Ready Business.

You got to bring up the last slide.

Yep, let me add this to the stage. There we go.

So what we're building here is an AI community where people can share their resources, share AI stories, ask for help and tips. That we're generating a monthly newsletter, uh, bimonthly newsletter that's going to start March 1st. That's going to have tips, tricks, programs, software, new things in AI. AI is not something you just learn on Monday, and it's evolving every single day. We probably could do another co-work in a couple of weeks, and there'll be a lot more power to the tool. The newsletter will be coming out. It'll be bimonthly. It'll be hands-on practical things that you can use AI for beginners, intermediate people. You can use in your daily life, not just your business. The program will also include videos, tutorials, hands-on how to use the different software, how to write prompts, what AI tools are good for certain things. As many of you probably know, every AI tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and some are better than others depending on the task that you're trying to do. We're trying to demystify these. We're trying to get it so people start using it. The phrase that I use is AI is coming. You can either stand on the sidelines or get off the sidelines and start learning more about it and start helping you in your job as well as your personal life. And we want to thank you for joining us today. We hope you got value. We're going to be doing this on Wednesdays going forward, and we're going to pick different topics. So if there's a specific topic you would like to learn more about, feel free to shoot us an email, shoot us questions if you have it about AI, and we'll do our best to get back to you and answer everything you have or answer the question that you have. I don't know if you have any closing remarks, Ary.

No, that's it. Thank you so much, everyone. Please reach out, email us, and, uh, let us know what you thought. Reach out to us via LinkedIn or via email. And thanks again for joining us today. We want to hear your feedback, your comments. What do you want to see next? What do you want to see next week? We're hoping to share more about Claude Cowork, but if there's anything else you want to see in the coming weeks, reach out and let us know. Thank you so much, everyone.