Claude Cowork terms, defined.

What is Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agentic workspace for non-developers. It lets a team hand off real multi-step work to Claude, which can use tools, browse and act on the web, work across files, and run tasks on a schedule, all from a desktop app instead of a chat window. Most teams that have Cowork use a fraction of what it can do. The gap between a team typing questions into Cowork and a team running scheduled assistants that do the work is where the return lives.

MCP integrations

MCP integrations connect Claude Cowork to the tools your team already runs, so it can pull data and take actions inside them instead of stopping at chat. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard that lets Cowork read from and write to outside systems like your CRM, calendar, docs, or ticketing tool. In practice this is what turns Cowork from a smart assistant that talks into one that actually operates your stack, checking a system, updating a record, or moving work forward on its own.

Scheduled tasks

Scheduled tasks let a Claude Cowork assistant run on its own recurring cadence with no one kicking it off. You define the job once, daily, weekly, or on your own schedule, and Cowork executes it every time without a prompt. This is what moves work off a person's plate for good. A report that got built every Monday, a check that had to happen every morning, an outreach that depended on someone remembering, all of it runs on schedule instead of on memory.

Custom assistants

A custom Cowork assistant is a purpose-built version of Claude shaped around one specific job and your way of doing it. Instead of a general chat that starts cold every time, it carries your instructions, your voice, and your process, so it produces the right output the same way every run. This is the difference between asking an AI for help and having a repeatable worker for a defined task, one that a teammate can trigger without knowing anything about prompting.

Computer control

Computer control lets a Claude Cowork assistant operate applications directly, clicking, typing, navigating, and logging into systems the way a person would. It matters most for tools that have no clean integration: if a human can do it on screen, Cowork can be set up to do it too. This is how Cowork reaches into the messy, real-world software a business actually runs on, not just the systems with a tidy API.

See these in practice on the use cases page, or read how it works.