The Claude Update You've Been Waiting For

So this week in AI, we're seeing all kinds of crazy consumer-facing products that are trying to automate, well, things that you do manually, either in your personal life or at work. More concretely, Claude released several preset packs for either entrepreneurs or legal tasks that I want to show you inside of Cowork. They're just available now. They're right there if you're already using it. These are quickly becoming some of the most used plugins in existence. And then secondly, I want to have a quick look at what Google is doing with Android and how they're integrating just AI into everything. And I like the sequence because really these Claude plugins are how to do it manually now yourself. And the Google version is their vision of how all of this stuff just kind of happens automatically for you in the future. So let's get into it by starting with this. I think this is actually really exciting for me too, because Claude released a set of plugins for small businesses. Now, quick context, if you're not familiar, what we're talking about here is plugins that were released. And plugins are really a combination of multiple things. Actually, maybe I could borrow this slide from a HighLevel program that I'm running where I teach plugins. And they're basically just this big package deal of prompts. That's what skills are. Connectors, which is a dynamic way of bringing in data. And then just automations that make things run. That's a plugin. It's just all of that in one. And here's the thing, within a plugin, you could have multiple prompts or skills, multiple connectors, and have everything just run. So it's really a system to get something done. And concretely, where you can find these is, well, within Cloud Code or within Cloud Cowork. Now we'll be looking at Cowork because that's kind of the sweet spot for many consumers. And it's also the one I would recommend. And you can access it if you have the Cloud Desktop app installed, one, if you're on a paid plan, two, and then you just need to go over here and tab over from chat to Cowork. And then if you navigate here to Customize, you will see this personal plugins area. And here, I know this is a bit convoluted, if you click plus under Browse Plugins, now you can finally search for this new plugin pack they released. So I warn you, this is a very manual way of doing things. You have to press a lot of buttons and set a lot of things up. But that's the state of AI right now. If you're expecting your business to be just ran by agents by pressing a button, keep dreaming. It's just not how it is right now. So now that I'm finally in here, I can look for small business. And when I press plus here, it installs this small business plugin pack for me. Now let's unpack it for a second and just look at what's happening at the frontier of AI in terms of consumer products. This right here, look, it's a plugin with a total of 31 skills. So remember, skills are basically just packaged prompts. Often it can be a multi-step prompt, like do this, then that, then that. But it's basically prompts. And connectors are just a way to dynamically bring in data, as I mentioned. So if you connect it to Slack, it can look into your Slack messages, get data from there. QuickBooks, I could pull your invoices and other things. Now, the interesting question, what's inside of this plugin? What kind of different things can I do with it? Well, in their blog post, they outline it all. Here's a list of the different skills. There's one skill to plan your payroll. There's another one to help chase down invoices automatically. Now, one important thing about all of this is that they're designed to have a human in the loop, meaning these are set up by default to get you, I don't know, 99% of the way there, but then you still have to confirm to make it run. You could change that, but just know that's the way it is set up by default. And then while this might have been a lot of context on plugins, really what I want you to take away is that if you install this plugin package, you have all of these different skills or prompts pre-installed on your machine. And then here from this blog article, for example, if I wanted to use the invoice chase skill, then it would be good to use that in combination with both QuickBooks and PayPal connectors, which makes a lot of sense, right? Inside of QuickBooks, QuickBooks, you probably know which invoices have not been paid. Like, these are the sources of information on who has paid before or who hasn't. That's really all there is to it. Now, one thing that might become immediately obvious to you is that, hey, if you're not using any of these connectors, if you're not using QuickBooks or PayPal or HubSpot or whatever, then what do I do? Now, quite honestly, if you're not using the connectors to QuickBooks in the invoice chasing example, you're probably out of luck because these skills are highly specific to working with that connector. Let me show you. If I go to customize And then I go to the small business plugin that, well, contains all of these skills right here. See this full list of them right here? If I go to the InvoiceChase plugin, you will see it's basically just a prompt that I can look at down here. It's just all of this. And you'll see inside of the prompt, it's very specific towards QuickBooks. So it starts by creating an AR aging report, scoring each customer by payment history, and drafting a tone-matched reminder for each overdue invoice. And then as you can see, it pulls that from QuickBooks, cross-references PayPal settlements. And then it scores each customer. If you wanted to use it with other apps, you would need to rewrite this prompt a little bit, which is not too hard. But also, if you're completely new to AI, this is not something you're going to be doing. Let's be honest. You could try, I guess. The way you do it is you go up here to edit, you say customize with Claude, and you can say customize the invoice chase skill on the small business plugin for me based on my company. This assumes that there's information about your company. So you better have what I call DNA files, which are just these context documents and you, your business, or you provide the info here and you say, hey, I don't use QuickBooks, I use XYZ, then it reworks the skill so that it can work for you. Pooh, there you go. So I know for some of you, this might be like, oh, cool, new plugins, amazing. And for others, it might be, pah, Igor, what are you talking about? I've never seen or done this before. Well, that's fine. Now you know that it exists. Now you know where the space is heading. And to round this out, let me actually show you one of these in action. And the first one to run is, well, their onboarding skill. You don't have to set all of this up by yourself. All you need to do is say /smb and then pick this one, SMB Onboard. So if I just run this, it will start working with me to get this entire plugin set up. There's a lot there. Then it starts asking me questions. How many people work with you including yourself? 10+. What should I focus on helping you first? And here it looks at my context, right? So if you have a context-rich Cloud Cowork already, if you're following this channel, I hope you do. I teach that left and right. This is where you'll have a smoother experience here. And by the way, before I continue, I just want to spend 5 seconds saying, if you want me guiding you through how to set up your context, well, we'll put a link in the description. We have an AI Advantage Club where you can get a 30-day trial for $1. And in there, I have a course on how to set up your context initially. It's called the Level 2 Navigator course. And honestly, if you take 1 hour of your time and pay the $1, I'll get you there. Anyway, link is below if that's interesting to you. We've been building that out over the past few months. It's finally at a point where I feel confident moderator here. But let's continue down this journey because it has some of my context, it knows what I'm working on. So yeah, maybe I want to work on content production pipelines. That's something relevant to me. And I want this to check in with me daily. So Gmail and Notion is already connected. That's a good place to start. Other connectors can wait for later. And I'll just say continue. And then it actually looked for my Notion and found, well, multiple YouTube production pipelines that we have laying around there. Some of them must be the archived ones. And then what it does is it pulls in from the context that it had already on me in these DNA files to build a little bit of business context to go along with this plugin. I'll just say, looks right. And as you can see already, the point I'm trying to get across, the thing that will make this work is context on you and your company and your actual workflows. If you have a lot of that in here, and you could just attach it in this chat and start the onboarding skill, it will guide you through how to set some of these things up. And then once you do that, it does things like, well, it's started a daily check-in. And it makes a recommendation on what to try next. It says AI Advantage Social, which will turn a YouTube video into a podcast. And then it tells me, hey, there's also these deeper business skills like cash flow pipeline campaigns. This is honestly not something I manage with AI. For those, I would need a connector that I skipped for now. When I'm ready to wire up Slack, Canva, or Stripe, just say so and I'll walk you through it one at a time. So you're not alone with this. AI will help you set these things up, But you do need context. And you do need a base fluency within Cowork to make this work. But this is what's happening in the world. These things are coming out, people are implementing this. And I will show you one more. There's also a second pack like this they released. And this is one of the most used ones, although it's just a few days old. Compliance checks, legal risk assessments, and so much more. And all these connectors to, well, various document storage services and DocuSign. And you can set up processes where it just speeds up contract reviews or any one of these other skills. This is literally what the AI revolution for consumers looks like. And hey, if you're enjoying this content, make sure to leave a subscribe. It helps the channel out more than you think. And now let's look at the next piece of AI news that you can use. Android with Gemini intelligence. Look, this is what they envision that it would look like of, well, some of these plugins, some of these skills just being integrated in the background without you taking manual control like I was just showing you. For example, it would book classes by itself for you. Or what about this functionality on a phone where you can just ramble into the phone and it clarifies it for you, basically translating the way you actually speak into concise message. It also allows you to build custom widgets as you need them. So basically vibe coding on a smartphone, and then the widget just lives on your home screen. Or something we'll see more and more of is automating multi-step tasks, like what we just looked at. Look at QuickBooks. Who did we miss? Create a report on who's behind on invoices. Use Gmail to draft an email. Now that's a very specific one, but some of these will be possible on an Android phone, where it just does these multiple steps with the help of AI. And then the context just gets automatically from some of your other apps. So that's the pipeline. Here we do things manually, and eventually they will arrive on your phone. But honestly, if you want an edge, you kind of have to tinker, you have to try these things, you have to play with these plugins. And then as always, I just want to briefly touch on some other stories that happened. One of them is an update that they made to Claude Code, the product positioned above Cowork, which is, you know, even more manual. And they introduced two new things. One of them is the agent view, where now let's say instead of doing one task, you're doing four tasks at the same time. They created a new view where you can see those agents independently working on it. Their launch video showed it so beautifully. And another one is this feature called /goal, where all you do is you set a goal, you tell it what you want to get done, and it will somehow find a way to get there without asking you too many questions. Now, this sounds great in theory. Over time, we'll see how well this actually works. Everybody wants an AI assistant that just gets things done. The reality is, well, something more like I showed you in this video where you have to go through step by step, set things up, make sure the context is right, and then you let it run and you iterate. It's anything but a one-click solution. But once you get it working, it can be actually worth it. And then finally, I want to point towards this story as we put up the screen with all the stories that were on our radar this week. AI note-taker could waive attorney-client privileges. And basically it's saying, hey, if you work with a lawyer, yes, the lawyer has to maintain confidentiality. But if you put your note-taker in there, it's like bringing in a third party. And that might just waive your privilege of the conversation staying in the room. Because yeah, you basically let in another person into the room. So don't expect nothing to leave this room. It's a good one to be aware of. And yeah, those are basically the main things that caught my eye in generative AI this week. I hope you found some of this useful or interesting, even though you might not be using some of these plugins or products. And with that being said, my name is Igor Pogany, and I hope you have a wonderful week. AI news you can't use, breaking down the stories you actually care about. AI news you can't use, Igor's here to help you figure it out.