When Anthropic launched Claude Cowork as a research preview in January, it rattled SaaS stocks for a week. On Tuesday, the company made clear that was just a warm-up.
The full enterprise launch adds 10 department-specific plugins, over a dozen new connectors, native Excel and PowerPoint orchestration, and a feature that no other AI platform offers yet: company-controlled private plugin marketplaces. IT admins can now curate, distribute, and provision AI agents across their entire org with the same controls they use for any other enterprise software.
"2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise, but the hype turned out to be mostly premature," Kate Jensen, Anthropic's Head of Americas, told CNBC. "It was not a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach."
Plugins for Roles, Not Just Prompts
The 10 new plugins each target a specific function within most companies. They were built with practitioners in each domain, so the workflows, terminology, and output formats reflect how that work actually gets done -- not what a generalist chatbot guesses it should look like.
Here is the full lineup:
- HR: Offer letters, onboarding plans, performance reviews, compensation analyses
- Design: Critique frameworks, UX copy, accessibility audits, user research plans
- Engineering: Standup summaries, incident response coordination, deploy checklists, postmortems
- Operations: Process documentation, vendor evaluations, change request tracking, runbooks
- Financial Analysis: Market research, financial modeling, PowerPoint template creation and QA
- Investment Banking: Transaction document review, comparable company analyses, pitch materials
- Equity Research: Earnings transcript parsing, model updates, research note drafting
- Private Equity: Deal sourcing, diligence document review, scenario modeling, opportunity scoring
- Wealth Management: Portfolio analysis, drift detection, tax exposure, rebalancing recommendations
- Brand Voice (via Tribe AI): Distills your existing materials into enforceable voice guidelines
Each plugin is a portable file system. Companies own them outright, and they work across both Cowork and anything built on the Claude Agent SDK. That portability matters -- it means the customizations a finance team builds for Cowork can run in a completely different application if needed.
The Connector Layer Is What Makes It Real
Plugins without data access are just elaborate prompt templates. The connectors announced Tuesday turn Claude into something closer to a coworker who can actually open the same files and apps you use.
New integrations at launch include Google Calendar, Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, FactSet, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, Similarweb, MSCI, LegalZoom, WordPress, and Harvey. On the plugin side, Slack, LSEG, S&P Global, and Common Room have built their own plugins for joint customers.
This is where the announcement diverges from typical "AI + integrations" press releases. The connector directory now sits under a unified admin panel called "Customize," where IT teams manage which connectors are bundled into which plugins, control per-user provisioning, and even set auto-install policies. Anthropic also added OpenTelemetry support for tracking usage, costs, and tool activity across teams.
Claude Now Works Across Excel and PowerPoint
The announcement that might fly under the radar for non-enterprise readers is arguably the most technically interesting one. Claude can now orchestrate multi-step tasks across Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, passing context from one app to the other.
The practical version: tell Claude to run an analysis in Excel, then turn the results into a slide deck in PowerPoint. It handles the handoff itself. For anyone who has burned an afternoon reformatting spreadsheet data into presentation-ready visuals, this is a direct time reclaim.
It ships as a research preview via downloadable add-ins for Excel and PowerPoint, available on Mac and Windows for all paid Claude plans.
The Private Marketplace Model
The most strategically significant feature is the private plugin marketplace. Admins can curate an internal directory of approved plugins, set access by team or individual, and even pull plugins from private GitHub repositories (currently in private beta).
This mirrors how enterprise app stores work in mobile device management -- and it solves one of the biggest adoption blockers for AI agents in regulated industries. A bank's compliance team can approve specific finance plugins and lock down everything else. A law firm can ensure only vetted legal workflows reach associates.
"We are trying to make it much more accessible and much more ready for anyone to be able to use," Jensen told CNBC.
The approach also addresses the "2025 agent problem" that Jensen referenced. Last year's wave of AI agent products typically required bespoke integrations and custom engineering for each deployment. By shipping pre-built plugins with an app-store distribution model, Anthropic is betting that the last mile of enterprise AI adoption is not smarter models -- it is better packaging.
Where This Lands Against the Competition
OpenAI has ChatGPT Enterprise and its Codex platform, but nothing resembling a private plugin marketplace with provisioning controls. Google has deep Workspace integration via Gemini, but its agent architecture is not yet portable the way Claude's plugin files are. Microsoft Copilot has the Office integration advantage but lacks the agentic depth of purpose-built department plugins.
Anthropic's bet is that the combination of plugin portability, connector breadth, and IT-grade controls will make Claude the default "agent operating system" for enterprise knowledge work. "Engineers think about Claude Code as a tool that they just could not live without anymore," Jensen said. "We expect that every knowledge worker will feel that way about Cowork."
Market reaction was swift. Anthropic's partner stocks climbed -- Salesforce rose 4%, FactSet 5%, and DocuSign nearly 6% -- even as the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) had fallen 5% the day before on fears of exactly this kind of announcement.
The plugins are available now to all Cowork users. Admin controls for provisioning and marketplace management are rolling out to Team and Enterprise tiers. The Excel and PowerPoint add-ins are downloadable today.