Have you had your Claude Cowork moment yet?

I recorded a quick video of Claude in Excel handing Walmart Sales Data (Kaggle dataset). What came back in couple of mins would have taken me considerably longer to put together manually.

Claude Cowork is a new capability built into Anthropic's Claude Desktop app, currently in research preview. 

You point it at a folder on your computer, describe what you need in plain language, and Claude works through it autonomously. It can read your files, develop analysis, build the outputs, and also build slides. No code, no prompting gymnastics.

It's available on all paid Claude plans on both Mac and Windows. It's still early days, which makes what it can already do even more impressive.

After my initial prompt, everything you see in the video is FULLY autonomous. Claude decided which tools to use and when. It ran web searches for competitor data on its own. It built linked formulae, not static numbers. It chose which charts to use, where to place them, checked how things looked on screen, and adjusted column widths. It even reviewed its own work. I didn't touch a thing.

As someone who's been a data geek my entire career (from Lotus 1-2-3 to dBASE to FoxPro to Access to Excel), I found some of Claude's formula implementation choices genuinely fascinating. Others? I would NEVER. And that's exactly the point.

Three things I want you to take away from this: 

1\ AI can do incredible work at incredible PACE. The speed alone should make you curious. If you haven't sat down with these tools yet, you're leaving insight on the table.

2\ The limitations are REAL and they're shifting. What it can't do today, it might do next month or next quarter. Staying close to the tools is the only way to know where the line is.

3\ The outputs aren't perfect, and you shouldn't treat them like they are. Audit the work. Use your judgment. The people who build THAT muscle now (knowing when to trust, when to question, when to override) are the ones who'll get the most out of these tools as they improve.

Leverage AI, augment your thinking with it. Use it to build the intuition.

Until next time,

Ram

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Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

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A Message From Ram:

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Disclaimer:

Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."

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