Founders and business leaders are using Anthropic’s agentic work tool, Claude Cowork, to manage their busy schedules, organise their work, and hold themselves accountable to employees and investors.
Claude Cowork was created by Anthropic engineering lead Felix Rieseberg, who also oversees the implementation of the company’s hugely popular coding agent Claude Code within the Claude app for desktop computers. Cowork is currently only available through the desktop app.
Near the end of 2025, Rieseberg noticed that non-developers were increasingly using Claude Code to handle knowledge work tasks rather than software engineering. Rieseberg wanted to build a more beginner-friendly tool to meet these non-technical users’ needs.
In order to take actions on a computer, AI agents use programs called developer tools (or devtools). But most consumer computers don’t come with devtools pre-installed. The first time a user tries working with Claude Code, the coding agent will likely request to download the devtools it needs to do its job. “It’s a bit like a contractor that shows up at your work site,” Rieseberg says, “but doesn’t bring [their] own tools.”
Rieseberg felt that non-technical Claude users needed a solution in which the “contractor” arrives on the scene with their own tools ready to go, so he came up with a novel solution: Giving Claude its own tiny (virtual) computer. When a user sends a prompt to Claude Cowork, the agent spins up its own virtual computer (also called a virtual machine or VM), which already has all the devtools it needs installed, and can freely install any other tools it needs while working with you.
Cowork also has a slightly different system prompt than Claude Code, which gives the agent more explicit instructions for working with other applications and operating a browser.
Equipped with these tools, Claude Cowork can manipulate existing files on your computer (like cleaning up an Excel spreadsheet), creating new files (using the data from that spreadsheet to create a PowerPoint presentation), and using applications (submitting that presentation online using Google Chrome).
You can choose how much access to give the agent by assigning each new Cowork project to a specific folder on your computer, and then populating that folder with relevant files. Users can also connect Cowork to other data sources, such as their email, workplace communication platform, and meeting transcripts.
Here are a few ways that entrepreneurs and leaders like Rieseberg are finding creative ways to get more done with Claude Cowork.
Creating an AI chief of staff and editor in chief
Some entrepreneurs use Cowork projects to serve specific functions, or even stand in for traditionally-human employees. Stephanie Curcio, founder of patent search platform NL Patent, says that one project, which she named “chief of staff,” has been a game changer for her small company. After connecting her virtual chief of staff to data sources including her email and Google Drive, she directed it to give her a daily morning briefing that alerts her to upcoming meetings and any urgent requests. She gave the project instructions to not sugarcoat its recommendations and act like a true “sparring partner” when debating business decisions.
Curcio also created an “editor in chief” project that has access to most of her written materials and presentations, along with instructions directing it to generate content that matches her writing style. She has also created Cowork projects customised to review legal agreements and help her develop and further refine her brand identity.
Holding yourself accountable with a “promise layer”
Soon after Cowork’s launch, Rieseberg started getting hundreds of messages every day from people inside and outside of Anthropic. He used Cowork to triage his inbox, and now uses it to assist with much of his communications. Part of those communications efforts include a single “giant markdown file” containing all of the promises that Rieseberg has made to human coworkers at Anthropic. “It’s quite useful,” he says.
Promises are a valuable currency to business leaders, but can also be a “double-eged sword,” according to recent research coauthored by William Mayew, a business administration professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. CEO promises “can boost investor and stakeholder confidence,” the report says, “but they also lock the company into a pre-determined path and make later shortfalls or pivots reputationally costly.”
But promises aren’t official KPIs; they can be given out both formally and informally, in shareholder meetings and during brief hallway chats. Keeping track of all these promises, made across meetings, emails, and workplace messaging platforms like Slack, can be hugely difficult.
Juan Pablo Ortega has pushed even further in using Claude to hold himself accountable. Ortega is the founder of Yuno, a financial services infrastructure company that connects merchants with payment methods processors from all over the world, enabling global companies to have one unified payments system.
Near the start of 2026, Ortega connected Claude Cowork to his meeting transcripts, notes, email, and communications platforms, and used those connections to create what he refers to as a “promise layer.” If Ortega tells an employee in a meeting that he’s going to connect them with someone via email, he claims, Cowork registers that promise after processing the transcript, then autonomously drafts up an email connecting the two parties. “In the morning,” he says, “I go to my drafts and check that the drafts align with what I was hoping to do, then I send those initial emails.”
The idea for the promise layer actually came from Claude, Ortega says. The first time he used Cowork, he asked the agent to explain what it could do for him, and together they refined the idea for a system that tracks his promises and keeps him accountable by regularly scanning his transcripts, Slack messages, and emails. All that data goes into a single file containing information regarding the promise, the recipient of the promise, any deadlines related to the promise, and the source of the promise.
Within a few weeks, Ortega said, the promise layer became so large that he started running a recurring nightly task to review the file, remove promises that are no longer relevant, and “flag any promise that I haven’t fulfilled in the past three or four days.”
Building a live dashboard
Another way of using Cowork to stay on top of your work is to build a customised live dashboard, a new feature that Anthropic has added to the tool in recent weeks. By simply asking Cowork to build a dashboard and telling the agent which data and connectors to employ, you can create a unique piece of software designed just for you. Maybe it surfaces emails in urgent need of a response, or shares briefings for your meetings five minutes before they start.
Rieseberg isn’t an entrepreneur, but says the responsibility he has for Cowork, and the massive amount of work that goes along with the position, helps him to empathise with founders. He says he’s using Cowork to build dashboards to stay abreast of large quantities of data at a glance. Recently, he created a dashboard that shows him recommendations for which new Cowork features to invest in and which ones to “unship” by analysing user data. Rieseberg says these dashboards have largely replaced traditional reports for him.
Cowork is also helping Rieseberg appear more prepared for sales meetings. Before pitching Cowork to potential new customers, Rieseberg uses the tool to create a “hyper-personalised” demo containing specific use cases relevant to the prospective new client’s needs. If he suddenly learns before a pitch that the meeting has been shortened or extended by 30 minutes, he can simply ask Cowork to adjust the demo’s length on the fly. “Even though I’m not a lawyer,” Rieseberg says, “I can now give very good legal presentations to lawyers about how to use Cowork.”
Claude’s true calling: interior designer
But Rieseberg’s most mind-blowing recent use case for Cowork actually has nothing to do with work. Rieseberg is preparing to move into a new house, so he uploaded the house’s floor plan to Cowork and asked it to make a better interior design planning tool. Cowork took the floor plan and turned the entire thing into an interactive 3D model in which he can easily add and move around furniture, knock down walls, and experiment with various room configurations, like a hyper-personalised version of The Sims.
The time, effort, and amount of data that you put into Cowork will directly affect how much utility you get out of it, says Curcio. “A lot of people are just barely scratching the surface, and they’re just kind of lazy,” she adds, “but you have to invest the time with these systems to get them to interact with you in the way you want them to interact with you.” Giving Claude instructions is helpful for getting started, she says, but just as important are “all of the interactions that we’ve had, me and my boy Claude.”
Anthropic isn’t the only player in the agentic knowledge work space anymore. In the months since Cowork’s debut in January, OpenAI released Codex, its own agentic coding app for desktops, and is now working to make that app more palatable for non-coders. – Inc/TNS
