Anthropic boosts Claude Cowork with new plugins, admin tools

Anthropic has expanded the administrative controls and integration options for Claude Cowork, adding private plugin marketplaces, new connectors, and a research preview that links Claude's work between Excel and PowerPoint.

The update focuses on how organisations create, distribute, and govern plugins. Plugins sit alongside connectors and skills in Cowork and can package workflows for different teams. Anthropic positions plugins as a way to turn Claude into specialised agents for specific roles and departments.

Admin controls

Administrators can now set up private plugin marketplaces within their organisations. These marketplaces let companies distribute internal tools across teams while controlling what staff can access.

Teams can create plugins from starter templates or build them from scratch. During setup, Claude guides admins by asking questions to tailor skills, commands, and connectors to the organisation.

A new "Customize" menu brings plugins, skills, and connectors into a single interface, giving admins a consolidated view of what is deployed across the organisation and how it is configured.

Connector management has also been updated. The directory has been refreshed and admin controls streamlined. Cowork now makes it easier to manage which connectors are bundled into which plugins, according to Anthropic.

Additional governance options include organisation-specific marketplaces, per-user provisioning, and auto-install. Anthropic has also introduced private GitHub repositories as plugin sources in private beta.

For end users, Cowork now runs slash commands through structured forms. This frames workflows such as "generate report" or "dashboard" as form-driven tasks rather than free-form prompts.

Cowork also adds company branding features, including a redesigned home experience that reflects an organisation's identity.

Observability

The update adds OpenTelemetry support, allowing administrators to track usage, costs, and tool activity across teams using the standard.

For companies deploying AI tools across departments, visibility into usage patterns is increasingly important for cost management, adoption measurement, and internal policy enforcement.

Connector expansion

Anthropic has added new connectors to link Cowork to tools used across functions. New connectors include Google Workspace apps such as Calendar, Drive, and Gmail, along with Docusign, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, Similarweb, MSCI, LegalZoom, FactSet, WordPress, and Harvey.

Anthropic also said third parties have built plugins for joint customers to explore, including Slack by Salesforce, LSEG, S&P Global, Apollo, Common Room, and Tribe AI.

The connector push reflects a broader trend in enterprise AI, where vendors aim to integrate with established systems of record and productivity applications. Organisations often prefer to keep workflows in familiar tools and apply AI through add-ins or connectors rather than shift to a standalone environment.

Role-based templates

Anthropic has expanded its library of pre-built plugin templates, designed with practitioners in each field and using domain terminology and outputs aligned with day-to-day work.

New templates cover HR, design, engineering, and operations. HR templates include drafting offer letters, onboarding plans, performance reviews, and compensation analysis. Design templates include critique frameworks, UX copy, accessibility audits, and research plans. Engineering templates include stand-up summaries, incident response coordination, deploy checklists, and postmortems. Operations templates cover process documentation, vendor evaluation, change request tracking, and runbook creation.

The update also adds templates for finance and deal teams, including financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management. Anthropic highlighted workflows such as market research, modelling, building comparable-company analyses, parsing earnings transcripts, extracting data from document sets, and generating rebalancing recommendations.

One of the new plugins is a "Brand voice" plugin built by Tribe AI. Anthropic said it analyses documents, marketing materials, and conversations to produce brand voice guidelines.

Office workflow

Anthropic is previewing a feature that links Claude's actions across Excel and PowerPoint. The research preview lets Claude carry context from one Office add-in to the other, supporting multi-step tasks that start with analysis in Excel and end with slides in PowerPoint.

Anthropic described the feature as an early research preview, suggesting a path toward Claude working across apps in a way that mirrors how people move between tools.

Plugin user experience updates are available to all Cowork users. Branding, provisioning, and MCP controls are available to Team and Enterprise admins. The Excel and PowerPoint cross-app feature is available in research preview for paid plans on Mac and Windows.