When AI Gets Hands: A Claude Cowork Experiment
This week I gave Claude the keys.
Not to my thinking. To my computer.
I've been experimenting with Claude Cowork, Anthropic's new desktop agent.
We've seen AI work in the browser before, but this is different. This is AI operating the whole computer, not just a tab.
If you've heard me talk about the Three Bridges: Playbooks, Context, and Hands, this is Hands. Properly, finally, Hands (for the newcomers: Hands means AI that acts, not just advises).
What I tried
I had a folder of invoices saved from supplier emails, all with those messy auto-generated filenames. I gave Claude access to the folder, asked it to rename every file to YYYY-MM-DD suppliername.pdf, and watched.
It made itself a to-do list, opened each PDF, extracted the date and supplier name, and confirmed the new names with me before making any changes. Seven files, done cleanly.
Then I asked it to take the first invoice and enter it as a bill in Xero. It navigated my browser, found the right screen, and started filling in the fields. Slow, because it's taking screenshots and analysing each step rather than connecting directly through API.
But it got there.
And the key insight: it doesn't have to be faster than me. It’s still taking away the task and I don’t need to do it myself.
What's inside (and what's not ready yet)
Claude Cowork has plugins for finance and law that got a lot of headlines.
The finance one promises month-end journals, GL reconciliation, income statement variance analysis.
The legal one: contract review, NDA triage, meeting briefings. Impressive lists.
Sounds promising, right?
When you look inside though, you’ll find very detailed prompts (that make very interesting reading, by the way). And connectors which are needed for fetching your data and pushing results into your systems.
Right now there are very few connectors, and many are built for large enterprise infrastructure.
Not where most accounting and law firms live.
There's a real gap between the headlines and what will actually work when you set it up today.
That will change. Just not yet.
What this means for you
The most mature unique capability of Claude Cowork right now, is its native interaction with your file system.
Organising, renaming, processing local files. That’s powerful and robust.
The browser work like the Xero demo works but is slow.
And interacting with installed desktop apps, older systems that don't have browser or API options, is genuinely new and worth paying attention to, but again, can be hard to make work.
My recommendation:
Have a play with Claude Cowork.
If you've got someone in your team who's a bit of an IT whiz, get them to set it up on a spare device. Or try it yourself over a weekend. Start with file management. See what it does.
Don't start with your main work device.
I run Claude Cowork on a separate device with only certain apps installed and its own limited logins. When I give it access to Xero, it logs in as its own user, not as me, so I know exactly what it did. For now, Claude Cowork is not your ‘roll out to the entire team’ tool. It’s your ‘let’s experiment in a contained environment with deliberate, limited access’ tool.
Want more?
Want to see where this fits in with everything else happening in AI right now? Join me this Friday for a free one-hour webinar. We'll cover the big moves and you'll do a self-assessment to see where your firm stands heading into 2026. Register at inbal.com.au/events
—
Inbal Rodnay
Guiding Firms in Adopting AI and Automation
Keynote speaker | AI Workshops | Executive briefings | Consulting CIO
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