This is why Claude Cowork is "Sending Shockwaves Through the Entire Stockmarket"

Background

This week, there were many sensational headlines along the lines of “Anthropic Just Sent Shockwaves Through the Entire Stock Market by Releasing a New AI Tool”. So what is Claude Cowork, and why is this latest release sending shockwaves?

What is Claude Cowork?

Let’s start with Anthropic’s definition:

Cowork uses the same agentic architecture that powers Claude Code, now accessible within Claude Desktop and without opening the terminal. Instead of responding to prompts one at a time, Claude can take on complex, multi-step tasks and execute them on your behalf. With Cowork, you can describe an outcome, step away, and come back to finished work—formatted documents, organized files, synthesized research, and more.

Even more so than I’ve experienced with Claude Code, Claude Cowork automatically functions as an orchestrator, spinning up multiple agents on different tasks, often in parallel, to accomplish your goal.

Now we don’t just have vibecoding, we have vibe office work. Yay?

What are Skills?

The real magic of Claude Cowork comes in the form of “Skills.” Skills are packages containing instructions, code snippets, and resources that Claude Cowork (or any agent supporting Skills) loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks. Think of them like recipes: each Skill lays out what tools to use, what format to follow, and what the finished product should look like. This lets an agent reliably produce polished work—a branded report, a data analysis following your team’s workflow, a slide deck in your company’s template—without you having to explain the process every time. (If you’re wondering what agents and tools are, read my last blog post here.)

Let’s do some vibe office work

For this demo, I gave Claude Cowork the Anthropic pptx Skill and a data-storytelling Skill I found here. I also gave it a PowerPoint template deck I found here.

I tasked Claude Cowork with creating a data analysis presentation of Disney’s latest quarterly earnings report. Below is a screenshot of the Cowork interface and the prompt I gave it, typos and all.

Is what it came back with any good?

Yeah. It didn’t use the template perfectly and a few charts are a bit wonky, but it’s very solid. You can download the PowerPoint deck it made here, or if you prefer, there’s an HTML version you can view in the browser here. Below is a representative screenshot from one of the slides.

So why the shockwaves?

With a casually typed prompt, a couple of community Skills, and a free template, Claude Cowork produced a good earnings analysis Powerpoint deck in minutes. No specialized software required. I don’t even have Powerpoint installed on my computer! (if you’re curious how Claude Cowork does this, it uses the PptxGenJS Javascript to Powerpoint npm package)

Skills will get better. The orchestration will get smarter. Templates and formatting will tighten up. The gap between “passable” and “polished” is closing fast.

That’s why the stock market flinched. Not because AI is coming for office workers (that’s old news). It flinched because Cowork points to a future where the SaaS tools those workers depend on become optional. Why pay for a presentation builder (Creative Cloud, ADBE -9% 5d), a data visualization platform (Tableau, CRM -10% 5d), or a data synthesis tool (LexisNexis, RELX -18% 5d) when an agent can do it all natively from a single prompt? Every specialized SaaS product that essentially transforms data from one format into another just got put on notice. We’re not there yet, but if you squint, you can see it from here.