Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new agent tool designed to take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code and transform it into a more general-purpose tool that doesn’t benefit non-coders. Today Anthropic is launching a new feature within Cowork to make it even more powerful for business users.

Behold, the plug-in.

The idea behind plug-ins is simple: They are designed to automate “specialized” tasks within different company departments. Whether that function is drafting content for the sales department, reviewing risk documents for a company’s legal team, or drafting responses for customer support, the plug-in is designed to use agent automation to streamline work with a special focus.

The company says you can use plug-ins to “tell Claude how you want work, which tools and data to capture, how to manage critical workflows, and which slash commands to expose so your team gets more consistent results.”

Matt Piccolella, who works on Anthropic’s product team, told TechCrunch that the plug-ins are built to be customized and that the company expects business users to create their own use cases for them. Anthropic open sourced 11 of its in-house plug-ins as part of Friday’s release, but noted that custom plug-ins are “easy to create, edit, and share” and can be used without much technical expertise.

Plug-ins have been created contained within the Claude Code for some time, and their expansion to Cowork is simply designed to use the same tool and share it with different types of users. “Really, what we’re doing with this launch is just bringing them to Cowork and giving them the kind of user-friendly, UI-centric flavor that will allow the most people to use it,” Piccolella said.

Piccolella points to data analytics and sales as two departments within Anthropic where plug-ins are already showing promise. “There’s a lot of sales, for our direct sellers, but also getting any kind of sales that are adjacent, better connected to customer and customer feedback and everything,” he said.

Anthropic says that the more business users use plug-ins, the more Claude learns about a company’s workflows and how to optimize them. Currently, plug-ins are saved locally on a user’s machine, though Anthropic says an organization-wide sharing tool is on the way.

Cowork, which was just released about two weeks ago, is in its research preview. It’s unclear when it will be rolled out more widely. For now, the plug-ins will be available to all Claude’s paying customers, Anthropic said.