July 12, 2026 • 16 mins
You've probably seen Cowork mentioned inside Claude, or perhaps you clocked the headlines when Microsoft folded it into Copilot a couple of weeks ago. Either way, the question people keep asking is simple: how is this actually different from just chatting with Claude?
The answer comes down to files, time and money - three things that change quite dramatically once you move from chat to Cowork.
In this How I AI episode, Neo and I unpack exactly what Cowork can do that regular chat can't, how to know which one to reach for, and what the new Microsoft version means if you're a Copilot user.
What you'll learn:
- What actually changes when Claude can touch files on your own computer
- The simple test for deciding between Chat and Cowork for any task
- How Cowork differs from Claude Code, and who each one is really built for
- Three lesser known Cowork features worth exploring
- What Microsoft's version of Cowork does differently, and what it costs
- Practical AI tools for productivity and focus
- Real-world AI workflows used by high performers
- How to use AI at work without burning out
- Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load
Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.
How I AI with Dr Amantha Imber and Neo Aplin explores how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm.
Want more practical ways to put AI to work? You can now follow How I AI separately on Spotify or Apple Podcasts s
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cowork is a word you're probably hearing a lot right now.
Maybe you've already started using it within Claude, maybe you've
just seen it pop up and wondered what is all
the fuss about? And a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft
dropped cowork into Copilot, so if you're in a Microsoft environment,
it's about to become very relevant very quickly. But there's
(00:23):
a question that keeps coming up, how is cowork actually
different from just using chlaud chat. In this episode, Neo
and I get into exactly that. We cover what cowork
can do that regular chat can't, specifically when it comes
to working with files on your computer and how to
(00:44):
know which one to reach for and when, and what
Microsoft's version means for Copilot users. By the end of
this episode, you will have a clear sense of what
cowork is built for and whether it's something you should
be using.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
More of.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Welcome to how IAI with me Doctor Amantha Imber and
Neo Applin, head of Inventium AI. Each episode we share
one practical way to use AI better at work and
in life. No fluff, no deck jagon, just things you
can use straight away. Today we're going to be talking
about Cowork and Clawed Cowork has been out for a
(01:33):
few months at time of recording, and what is really
interesting is that Microsoft has just announced that it is
also offering Cowork, which has gone live I think two
weeks ago at time of recording, and if you are
a Microsoft co Pilot user, your organization may or may
(01:55):
not be enabling that shortly. So we're going to be
getting into cow so neo. What is cowork, I guess
clawed Cowork. Let's start there.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
It's clawd but better. No, the marketing cospas what it is.
It's it is claud a bit better in a sort
of way, which is you can use Claude, but now
with files on your own computer and that becomes the
superpower there. So ordinarily you're limited by the number of
files and the file size that you can upload to Claude,
(02:27):
whether it be in a chat thread or within a project.
And I'll come back to the project bit in a second.
So the number of files the file size you're limited to.
Now with Cowork, you are using files from your own
computer and it's able to touch and well called poppet
master the files on your own computer, which means you've
got unlimited number of files and also unlimited file size,
(02:49):
and then Claude can do things on those files, so
it's not just about reading them and then maybe create
another file that you can download here. It can read them,
it can move them, it can delete them, it can
shift them around, it can rename them as well as
create artifacts based on your files. So it becomes a
lot more powerful in your files, on your file system.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So how then, or what are the other ways that
it is different from just the regular chat function, which,
for example, if you are accessing Claude through a browser,
all you can do is chat. So let's just clarify
that you can only access claud Cowork with the desktop
version of Claud. So tell me other way is that
(03:31):
the two are different?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yep, that is the key first difference. You can only
access it if you've downloaded the app. Also, if you're
in a company, your company can choose to enable that
or disable that as well. So you might find it's
there for you, or it may not be there for you.
Maybe you need to bribe the head of it with
some chocolate. I don't know whether you need to get
access to it. There's also they've actually changed just today
(03:56):
where the button is so in your little normal chat
prompt window, there's a little toggle there on the desktop version,
so you can say, I want to do this thing
in chat, or I want to do this thing in Cowork,
so you can pick where it's going to be, and
also there's a project or folder that you want to
work in. So what they're trying to do is kind
(04:16):
of all the things we had before. So you could
have a normal chat, or you could have a chat
in a project and you could do those in the cloud,
or you could have a normal chat or a chat
in a project and you can do that in Cowork.
What they've tried to do is bring that all together,
so you've got a few more decisions you can make,
but also it makes it a nice simple place to
have it. Also, what they've done is all your conversations
are together, whether they're in chat cloud or in Cowork
(04:38):
on your computer. So they've brought allized together, which is
quite quite lovely. But ultimately what happens when you're in
Cowork is you can just do regular Cowork in which
case I'm working on something, or even better, I can
then hook it into a folder and so you can
work in a folder. You can have different folders for
different purposes if you want to. We're going to talk
later on about it in a separate session about it.
(05:00):
Second brain, so you might have a second brain. Everything
about you is in a particular folder, and so therefore
you can say, all right, Cowork, we're going to work
in this folder. All of my files are here, and
then we can start talking turkey about those files or
making files or shifting files and things like that. So
the file management is the key. Where do you want
to work And you can say, maybe you're in maybe
(05:21):
you're a consultant. You might have a folder for one
of your clients. That's one of our project folders for
a project that for client A. You might have another
project for client B, and you can go to Cowork. Right,
I'm going to work with client A. Let's go to
client as folder and we'll start working through it. So
it becomes quite powerful for the documents I've got for
that purpose, let's just work on those, and it's really
(05:42):
good within co X. So that's the first change. The
second is really important for so many reasons, which is
Cowork will work harder and longer to solve your problem,
but it needs to work on your computer for this.
So ordinarily, if I sent a command to Claude in
claud Chat and I hit go, and I close my
(06:02):
laptop and I go away, it's working away in the cloud,
and I can pick that up, say on my phone
on coworking. Is only going to be on my computer. Yes,
it's using Cowork's brain in the cloud, absolutely, but it's
only going to be working on my computer. But what
that also means is it can work longer at a problem.
So it can say I've got a whole bunch of
things I need to do for Neo. They've got to
(06:23):
do this, I've got to do that. I've got to
review a couple of things. I've got to shift a
whole bunch of files around, and maybe that'll take fifteen
to twenty minutes. It can work at that. So it's
great to be able to solve bigger problems, or particularly
ones where there's lots of data. So you might say
I've got a thousand files I want you to sort.
It can do that. It might cost a lot of
tokens to do that, so it can work longer. It
(06:44):
can get a lot more stuff done on your machine.
But of course because it's working longer and doing more stuff,
it's going to cost you more tokens, and so you
might finally going to burn some of your usage there
as well. So with great power, great financial responsibility.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Obviously, if you have no idea what we're talking about
when we're talking about burning through tokens, go back and
listen to the episode that we did or recently on tokenomics,
because using claud cowork is a really great way to
burn through tokens fast, particularly if you don't know what
you're doing. So just for a really simple simple heuristics,
(07:22):
when you are sitting down to use Claude and you're
not sure whether you should be using the Claud chat
or Claud Cowork, what are some really simple questions that
we can ask ourselves to go which one should I
be using?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
First? Would be we need to look at files for this.
So here's a great use case. Maybe I've took use
cases to answer the question. You might have a whole
bunch of receipts seeing in a folder. You've got photos,
you've got PDF files and all those kinds of things,
and you need to sort through those, and you also
need to add each receipt to a line item on
a spreadsheet something like that, and maybe there's a thousand
(08:00):
seats that's going to take you how long to open
all those up? You can get clawed cowork to do that.
So you'll have to prompt it and say, I've got
a bunch of receipts. Here's the folder, what you're sort through.
It need you to put each of them in these
different categories. Maybe there's one there for travel, and maybe
there's one there for software services or something like that.
And also for each receipt, I want you to pull
out these things, how much it is, what the GST is,
(08:22):
and where I spent it, and put it into a spreadsheet,
and here's the spreadsheet. I need you to start populating.
And so it'll then sort through those files. So if
you need to sort through files, definitely co work. It
will then move the files, definitely a cowork thing. And
if it's going to then update a spreadsheet, then that
is a really good thing to do with co work.
So it's actually working on your files on your machine
(08:45):
as opposed to producing something from scratch. So if it's
producing something from scratch, so I'm doing some research and
maybe to create a little bit of research doss here
off the Internet, I could easily use Chat, or I
could use co work, because if I'm researching the Internet,
I'm not really researching stuff on my computer. So for
those kind of things, maybe Chat is fine, and I
(09:06):
highly recommend and would still use chat for those kind
of things. But if it's knowing a lot about my documents.
I've got lots of documents I needed to know about
and understand, or I need to work with and move
those documents, then absolutely I would use claud Cowork. The
other is if I needed to search through and find
things in my documents, it can be expensive token ways
(09:27):
to do that, but it is able to do that
and pass through folders and things like that, because it
will then be able to work through those many folders
you've got and understand what words are. And so you
might have a projects folder. It'll understand okay, Neo's projects
are probably there, and you might see that there's project decks. Oh,
I understand what that's about, and so it can help
(09:48):
you to discover things as well.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Now, for those that are thinking, hmm, Claud cowork and
there's also claud code. These two different things, and how
are they different? Neo, can you answer this question.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, the techniques would say coworkers. The baby version of
code and the kind of ways it is code is
certainly not user friendly. Code will do things harder and
longer than co workers, so you've got to watch your
token usage there. And it really was built for people
who are coding, that's what it was built for. And
(10:24):
it can do things like spin up multiple agents to
do things in the background and all those kind of things,
and so it is so so powerful cloud code and
there's other things you can do with it. For the
average knowledge worker, though if you're not a programmer that is,
cloud code is probably a sledgehammer, and the learning to
be able to get into and use cloud code and
(10:44):
do it well is going to be high. So that's
why they've built called cowork, which is there not so
high for people to be able to manage, but it'll
still do things like work through your files, figure out
plan things, confirm that with you, and then be able
to do lots of quite complicated things like you know,
compare these three documents together and then build a comparison matrix,
(11:05):
and oh, you can do a whole bunch of things
like that. In in clord cowork, you do the same
thing in code, but the setup and learning is so
much less in Cowork.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Okay, now finally in Cowork. Are there any other cool
features that we haven't mentioned yet?
Speaker 2 (11:22):
One of them, there's a bunch have a look at
it artifacts. You can actually get it to produce effectively.
They like little mini applications. You can even recently share
some of those applications, so you can even plug in
the applications to your data. So one of the ones
that I have is it goes through and it checks
my meetings and who I'm talking to and things like that,
(11:42):
and it builds a little artifact showing me who I'm
talking to for what meaning, for what purpose. Those kind
of things, so really good for an app There there's
another one called Scheduled, which does what it says on
the tin. You can get it to do things on
your computer using Cowork whatever time you want, so you
might have a daily report generally to those kind of things.
And it can be quite a complicated piece of work
(12:03):
that to do, like a monthly reconciliation. If you've got
finance tasks, you can get it to do a whole
bunch of very complicated finance tasks like monthly reconciliations and
things like that. So schedule's great for those kind of things.
And you can schedule multiple things and even get different
schedule to build different skills and so one follows another
and things like that. So awesome for there. And the
(12:24):
third I we'll just mention, which is technically in beta
although it works quite well, is dispatch, which is I
can use my phone to talk to my Claud cowork
on my computer, which is quite an amazing thing. But
your computer does need to be on and this is
why people were buying a whole bunch of macmini's while back,
so they can get Claude to be there home base
(12:45):
and I'm working twenty four to seven as opposed to
a laptop.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
One final question, the cowork that is going into Microsoft
co Pilot, is this essentially exactly the same as what
we're experiencing in claw Cowork.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Jeez, it's close. So Microsoft have done a deal with Claude,
and what they've done is they've got a lot of
the Claud technology and they've placed it within their cowork products.
So if you're used to Claud Cowork, Microsoft's Cowork will
look quite familiar to you. It's even using claud Opus
behind the scenes, so it'll do very similar things. Plans
(13:21):
what it's going to do, it's going to work on files,
it will work longer, and all those kind of things. Now,
being Microsoft, they've put in some of the wonderful things
that they do, which is all within your environment. So
they're using a thing they now called work Iq, which
is effectively you can see stuff well copilot and cowork
and see stuff that only as you should be able
to see. So all your meetings or your emails or
your files can get brought in as opposed to just
(13:44):
the ones on your computer. The other thing about the
Microsoft Cowork is it only works in the cloud, so
it works on your one drive and it can bring
in files from your share point and things like that,
so it's not like you point to a folder. It
actually effectively creates that folder every single time, and you
can get it to bring in far and all those
kind of things. But yeah, you could use skills just
like claud Can, which is wonderful. I'm very excited about
(14:06):
that in the Microsoft ecosystem, and you can even just
migrate them over kind of. There's a couple of small
things in the gamil for those gigs who need to
have a look at that. But yeah, you can use
effectively the same thing as claud skills. It'll work on
these things. It works in the cloud, and it works
within the Microsoft tenant, the Microsoft ecosystem, which is absolutely wonderful.
Probably the one thing I'd say about Cowork is is
very much a pay to play, So every single chat
(14:28):
you have with cowork will use tokens and it's effectively
like a cent us per not a cent us per chat.
I got to say. So, the calculators are out. There's
actually a Microsoft calculator. You can say what kind of
work you do I would be banking on. They're saying
about one hundred and fifty dollars to about three hundred
and fifty dollars per user per month.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
And that's US dollars.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
That's US dollars from the communities that I'm on there
doing calculations of their knowledge where because and they're saying, yeah,
it's probably closer to about two hundred and fifty US
per user per month to be able to do things
in Claude in co pilot Cowork, and some of the
most expensive things are really simple like read this PDF
(15:14):
or take this PDF and turn it into a PowerPoint deck.
That's like ten bucks to do that on average, I've
found by looking at these kind of things, So ten
bucks for PowerPoint deck, they better be a really good
PowerPoint deck. So yeah, do watch out for these kind
of usage things. But it's amazing if you want to
open it up. But of course I recommend you train
your stuff on how to do this and also do
(15:35):
these things in some token efficient ways as well. But
it's quite impressive how they've got that in the Microsoft
Eker system.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yes, very very exciting for Microsoft users. Neo, thank you
for coming on and sharing what exactly cowork is. I
know that we are both hardcore users of it and
use it every day, and hopefully that is cleared up
a few questions that people might have had about this
thing called Cowork. How AI was hosted by me Amantha
(16:06):
Imber and Neo Applan. A big thank you to Martin
Imber who does our sound editing, and Jim Rubio for
production support, and thank you to John Kilby who composed
the theme music.
Cowork is a word you're probably hearing a lot right now.
Maybe you've already started using it within Claude, maybe you've
just seen it pop up and wondered what is all
the fuss about? And a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft
dropped cowork into Copilot, so if you're in a Microsoft environment,
it's about to become very relevant very quickly. But there's
(00:23):
a question that keeps coming up, how is cowork actually
different from just using chlaud chat. In this episode, Neo
and I get into exactly that. We cover what cowork
can do that regular chat can't, specifically when it comes
to working with files on your computer and how to
(00:44):
know which one to reach for and when, and what
Microsoft's version means for Copilot users. By the end of
this episode, you will have a clear sense of what
cowork is built for and whether it's something you should
be using.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
More of.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Welcome to how IAI with me Doctor Amantha Imber and
Neo Applin, head of Inventium AI. Each episode we share
one practical way to use AI better at work and
in life. No fluff, no deck jagon, just things you
can use straight away. Today we're going to be talking
about Cowork and Clawed Cowork has been out for a
(01:33):
few months at time of recording, and what is really
interesting is that Microsoft has just announced that it is
also offering Cowork, which has gone live I think two
weeks ago at time of recording, and if you are
a Microsoft co Pilot user, your organization may or may
(01:55):
not be enabling that shortly. So we're going to be
getting into cow so neo. What is cowork, I guess
clawed Cowork. Let's start there.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
It's clawd but better. No, the marketing cospas what it is.
It's it is claud a bit better in a sort
of way, which is you can use Claude, but now
with files on your own computer and that becomes the
superpower there. So ordinarily you're limited by the number of
files and the file size that you can upload to Claude,
(02:27):
whether it be in a chat thread or within a project.
And I'll come back to the project bit in a second.
So the number of files the file size you're limited to.
Now with Cowork, you are using files from your own
computer and it's able to touch and well called poppet
master the files on your own computer, which means you've
got unlimited number of files and also unlimited file size,
(02:49):
and then Claude can do things on those files, so
it's not just about reading them and then maybe create
another file that you can download here. It can read them,
it can move them, it can delete them, it can
shift them around, it can rename them as well as
create artifacts based on your files. So it becomes a
lot more powerful in your files, on your file system.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So how then, or what are the other ways that
it is different from just the regular chat function, which,
for example, if you are accessing Claude through a browser,
all you can do is chat. So let's just clarify
that you can only access claud Cowork with the desktop
version of Claud. So tell me other way is that
(03:31):
the two are different?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yep, that is the key first difference. You can only
access it if you've downloaded the app. Also, if you're
in a company, your company can choose to enable that
or disable that as well. So you might find it's
there for you, or it may not be there for you.
Maybe you need to bribe the head of it with
some chocolate. I don't know whether you need to get
access to it. There's also they've actually changed just today
(03:56):
where the button is so in your little normal chat
prompt window, there's a little toggle there on the desktop version,
so you can say, I want to do this thing
in chat, or I want to do this thing in Cowork,
so you can pick where it's going to be, and
also there's a project or folder that you want to
work in. So what they're trying to do is kind
(04:16):
of all the things we had before. So you could
have a normal chat, or you could have a chat
in a project and you could do those in the cloud,
or you could have a normal chat or a chat
in a project and you can do that in Cowork.
What they've tried to do is bring that all together,
so you've got a few more decisions you can make,
but also it makes it a nice simple place to
have it. Also, what they've done is all your conversations
are together, whether they're in chat cloud or in Cowork
(04:38):
on your computer. So they've brought allized together, which is
quite quite lovely. But ultimately what happens when you're in
Cowork is you can just do regular Cowork in which
case I'm working on something, or even better, I can
then hook it into a folder and so you can
work in a folder. You can have different folders for
different purposes if you want to. We're going to talk
later on about it in a separate session about it.
(05:00):
Second brain, so you might have a second brain. Everything
about you is in a particular folder, and so therefore
you can say, all right, Cowork, we're going to work
in this folder. All of my files are here, and
then we can start talking turkey about those files or
making files or shifting files and things like that. So
the file management is the key. Where do you want
to work And you can say, maybe you're in maybe
(05:21):
you're a consultant. You might have a folder for one
of your clients. That's one of our project folders for
a project that for client A. You might have another
project for client B, and you can go to Cowork. Right,
I'm going to work with client A. Let's go to
client as folder and we'll start working through it. So
it becomes quite powerful for the documents I've got for
that purpose, let's just work on those, and it's really
(05:42):
good within co X. So that's the first change. The
second is really important for so many reasons, which is
Cowork will work harder and longer to solve your problem,
but it needs to work on your computer for this.
So ordinarily, if I sent a command to Claude in
claud Chat and I hit go, and I close my
(06:02):
laptop and I go away, it's working away in the cloud,
and I can pick that up, say on my phone
on coworking. Is only going to be on my computer. Yes,
it's using Cowork's brain in the cloud, absolutely, but it's
only going to be working on my computer. But what
that also means is it can work longer at a problem.
So it can say I've got a whole bunch of
things I need to do for Neo. They've got to
(06:23):
do this, I've got to do that. I've got to
review a couple of things. I've got to shift a
whole bunch of files around, and maybe that'll take fifteen
to twenty minutes. It can work at that. So it's
great to be able to solve bigger problems, or particularly
ones where there's lots of data. So you might say
I've got a thousand files I want you to sort.
It can do that. It might cost a lot of
tokens to do that, so it can work longer. It
(06:44):
can get a lot more stuff done on your machine.
But of course because it's working longer and doing more stuff,
it's going to cost you more tokens, and so you
might finally going to burn some of your usage there
as well. So with great power, great financial responsibility.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Obviously, if you have no idea what we're talking about
when we're talking about burning through tokens, go back and
listen to the episode that we did or recently on tokenomics,
because using claud cowork is a really great way to
burn through tokens fast, particularly if you don't know what
you're doing. So just for a really simple simple heuristics,
(07:22):
when you are sitting down to use Claude and you're
not sure whether you should be using the Claud chat
or Claud Cowork, what are some really simple questions that
we can ask ourselves to go which one should I
be using?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
First? Would be we need to look at files for this.
So here's a great use case. Maybe I've took use
cases to answer the question. You might have a whole
bunch of receipts seeing in a folder. You've got photos,
you've got PDF files and all those kinds of things,
and you need to sort through those, and you also
need to add each receipt to a line item on
a spreadsheet something like that, and maybe there's a thousand
(08:00):
seats that's going to take you how long to open
all those up? You can get clawed cowork to do that.
So you'll have to prompt it and say, I've got
a bunch of receipts. Here's the folder, what you're sort through.
It need you to put each of them in these
different categories. Maybe there's one there for travel, and maybe
there's one there for software services or something like that.
And also for each receipt, I want you to pull
out these things, how much it is, what the GST is,
(08:22):
and where I spent it, and put it into a spreadsheet,
and here's the spreadsheet. I need you to start populating.
And so it'll then sort through those files. So if
you need to sort through files, definitely co work. It
will then move the files, definitely a cowork thing. And
if it's going to then update a spreadsheet, then that
is a really good thing to do with co work.
So it's actually working on your files on your machine
(08:45):
as opposed to producing something from scratch. So if it's
producing something from scratch, so I'm doing some research and
maybe to create a little bit of research doss here
off the Internet, I could easily use Chat, or I
could use co work, because if I'm researching the Internet,
I'm not really researching stuff on my computer. So for
those kind of things, maybe Chat is fine, and I
(09:06):
highly recommend and would still use chat for those kind
of things. But if it's knowing a lot about my documents.
I've got lots of documents I needed to know about
and understand, or I need to work with and move
those documents, then absolutely I would use claud Cowork. The
other is if I needed to search through and find
things in my documents, it can be expensive token ways
(09:27):
to do that, but it is able to do that
and pass through folders and things like that, because it
will then be able to work through those many folders
you've got and understand what words are. And so you
might have a projects folder. It'll understand okay, Neo's projects
are probably there, and you might see that there's project decks. Oh,
I understand what that's about, and so it can help
(09:48):
you to discover things as well.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Now, for those that are thinking, hmm, Claud cowork and
there's also claud code. These two different things, and how
are they different? Neo, can you answer this question.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, the techniques would say coworkers. The baby version of
code and the kind of ways it is code is
certainly not user friendly. Code will do things harder and
longer than co workers, so you've got to watch your
token usage there. And it really was built for people
who are coding, that's what it was built for. And
(10:24):
it can do things like spin up multiple agents to
do things in the background and all those kind of things,
and so it is so so powerful cloud code and
there's other things you can do with it. For the
average knowledge worker, though if you're not a programmer that is,
cloud code is probably a sledgehammer, and the learning to
be able to get into and use cloud code and
(10:44):
do it well is going to be high. So that's
why they've built called cowork, which is there not so
high for people to be able to manage, but it'll
still do things like work through your files, figure out
plan things, confirm that with you, and then be able
to do lots of quite complicated things like you know,
compare these three documents together and then build a comparison matrix,
(11:05):
and oh, you can do a whole bunch of things
like that. In in clord cowork, you do the same
thing in code, but the setup and learning is so
much less in Cowork.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Okay, now finally in Cowork. Are there any other cool
features that we haven't mentioned yet?
Speaker 2 (11:22):
One of them, there's a bunch have a look at
it artifacts. You can actually get it to produce effectively.
They like little mini applications. You can even recently share
some of those applications, so you can even plug in
the applications to your data. So one of the ones
that I have is it goes through and it checks
my meetings and who I'm talking to and things like that,
(11:42):
and it builds a little artifact showing me who I'm
talking to for what meaning, for what purpose. Those kind
of things, so really good for an app There there's
another one called Scheduled, which does what it says on
the tin. You can get it to do things on
your computer using Cowork whatever time you want, so you
might have a daily report generally to those kind of things.
And it can be quite a complicated piece of work
(12:03):
that to do, like a monthly reconciliation. If you've got
finance tasks, you can get it to do a whole
bunch of very complicated finance tasks like monthly reconciliations and
things like that. So schedule's great for those kind of things.
And you can schedule multiple things and even get different
schedule to build different skills and so one follows another
and things like that. So awesome for there. And the
(12:24):
third I we'll just mention, which is technically in beta
although it works quite well, is dispatch, which is I
can use my phone to talk to my Claud cowork
on my computer, which is quite an amazing thing. But
your computer does need to be on and this is
why people were buying a whole bunch of macmini's while back,
so they can get Claude to be there home base
(12:45):
and I'm working twenty four to seven as opposed to
a laptop.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
One final question, the cowork that is going into Microsoft
co Pilot, is this essentially exactly the same as what
we're experiencing in claw Cowork.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Jeez, it's close. So Microsoft have done a deal with Claude,
and what they've done is they've got a lot of
the Claud technology and they've placed it within their cowork products.
So if you're used to Claud Cowork, Microsoft's Cowork will
look quite familiar to you. It's even using claud Opus
behind the scenes, so it'll do very similar things. Plans
(13:21):
what it's going to do, it's going to work on files,
it will work longer, and all those kind of things. Now,
being Microsoft, they've put in some of the wonderful things
that they do, which is all within your environment. So
they're using a thing they now called work Iq, which
is effectively you can see stuff well copilot and cowork
and see stuff that only as you should be able
to see. So all your meetings or your emails or
your files can get brought in as opposed to just
(13:44):
the ones on your computer. The other thing about the
Microsoft Cowork is it only works in the cloud, so
it works on your one drive and it can bring
in files from your share point and things like that,
so it's not like you point to a folder. It
actually effectively creates that folder every single time, and you
can get it to bring in far and all those
kind of things. But yeah, you could use skills just
like claud Can, which is wonderful. I'm very excited about
(14:06):
that in the Microsoft ecosystem, and you can even just
migrate them over kind of. There's a couple of small
things in the gamil for those gigs who need to
have a look at that. But yeah, you can use
effectively the same thing as claud skills. It'll work on
these things. It works in the cloud, and it works
within the Microsoft tenant, the Microsoft ecosystem, which is absolutely wonderful.
Probably the one thing I'd say about Cowork is is
very much a pay to play, So every single chat
(14:28):
you have with cowork will use tokens and it's effectively
like a cent us per not a cent us per chat.
I got to say. So, the calculators are out. There's
actually a Microsoft calculator. You can say what kind of
work you do I would be banking on. They're saying
about one hundred and fifty dollars to about three hundred
and fifty dollars per user per month.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
And that's US dollars.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
That's US dollars from the communities that I'm on there
doing calculations of their knowledge where because and they're saying, yeah,
it's probably closer to about two hundred and fifty US
per user per month to be able to do things
in Claude in co pilot Cowork, and some of the
most expensive things are really simple like read this PDF
(15:14):
or take this PDF and turn it into a PowerPoint deck.
That's like ten bucks to do that on average, I've
found by looking at these kind of things, So ten
bucks for PowerPoint deck, they better be a really good
PowerPoint deck. So yeah, do watch out for these kind
of usage things. But it's amazing if you want to
open it up. But of course I recommend you train
your stuff on how to do this and also do
(15:35):
these things in some token efficient ways as well. But
it's quite impressive how they've got that in the Microsoft
Eker system.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yes, very very exciting for Microsoft users. Neo, thank you
for coming on and sharing what exactly cowork is. I
know that we are both hardcore users of it and
use it every day, and hopefully that is cleared up
a few questions that people might have had about this
thing called Cowork. How AI was hosted by me Amantha
(16:06):
Imber and Neo Applan. A big thank you to Martin
Imber who does our sound editing, and Jim Rubio for
production support, and thank you to John Kilby who composed
the theme music.
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