Agentic AI and Claude CoWork: what the fuss is about | Post 1 of 6

Agentic tools like Claude CoWork are probably going to change the way many of us work. It's worth understanding what the fuss is about. I am going to unpack the significance in a series of posts, follow along if you're interested and please share your experiences in the comments.

For the past year, the software industry has been the focus of Agentic AI innovation, and Claude Code (among others) created a shift that allows humans to now oversee coding agents as opposed to writing any code themselves.

In early 2026, Anthropic took the learnings from Claude Code and created Claude CoWork, an agentic framework for thinking work: finance, marketing, sales, etc.

CoWork is software you run locally on your machine, not on the cloud (although the LLM calls are still external).

It's a shift from a chat interface because it can run complex multi-step workflows that take many minutes or hours to complete. This means we can task it with significant business goals, and leave it to solve them. It creates a plan and works through it, checking itself and retrying when it gets stuck.

It can produce multiple file outputs, locally on your machine, such as board-quality slide decks, documents and spreadsheets.

How it achieves this is something I will dive into in another post. For now, think on whether this type of capability would save you time.