Claude Cowork Plugins: Connect Your AI to Everything

Out of the box, Claude Cowork is a capable generalist — it can process files, build documents, research topics, and automate repetitive work. But generalists hit a ceiling. They don't know your CRM, your project tracker, your company's brand guidelines, or how your finance team structures journal entries.

Plugins change that equation.

Anthropic's plugin system lets you install pre-built packages that give Cowork domain expertise, tool connections, and workflow knowledge specific to your role. Install the sales plugin and Cowork knows how to prep for calls, research prospects, and draft outreach. Install the finance plugin and it understands reconciliation workflows, variance analysis, and audit preparation.

As of February 2026, the ecosystem includes 11 official open-source plugins from Anthropic, a growing wave of enterprise connectors (Google Workspace, DocuSign, WordPress, and more), and the ability to build your own.

What a Plugin Actually Is

A plugin is a bundle of three things:

Skills — domain knowledge encoded as instructions. These are markdown files that tell Claude how to think about a specific domain. The sales plugin's skills include how to structure a call prep document, what makes a good battlecard, and how to qualify prospects. Claude draws on these automatically when the context is relevant.

Commands — explicit actions you trigger with slash commands. Type /sales:call-prep and Cowork runs a structured call preparation workflow. Type /data:write-query and it helps you build a SQL query. Commands are user-initiated, giving you direct control over when specific workflows run.

Connectors — integrations with external tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). These wire Cowork into your actual stack — your CRM, project tracker, data warehouse, communication tools. Connectors are defined in a simple JSON configuration file, no code required.

The key design insight is that plugins are entirely file-based. No compiled code, no infrastructure, no build steps. Just markdown and JSON. This makes them easy to inspect, modify, and share.

The Official Plugin Lineup

Anthropic launched 11 open-source plugins through their knowledge-work-plugins repository. Here's what each one does and the tools it connects to:

Productivity — Task management, calendar integration, daily workflows, and personal context preservation. Connects to Slack, Notion, Asana, Linear, Jira, Monday, ClickUp, and Microsoft 365. This is the foundational plugin most users should start with.

Sales — Prospect research, call preparation, pipeline review, competitive battlecards, and outreach drafting. Connects to HubSpot, Close, Clay, ZoomInfo, Slack, Notion, Jira, Fireflies, and Microsoft 365.

Marketing — Content drafting, campaign planning, brand voice enforcement, and performance reporting. Connects to Canva, Figma, HubSpot, Amplitude, Notion, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, Slack, and Klaviyo.

Product Management — Spec writing, roadmap planning, user research synthesis, and competitive tracking. Connects to Linear, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Jira, Notion, Figma, Amplitude, Pendo, Intercom, Slack, and Fireflies.

Customer Support — Ticket triage, response drafting, escalation management, and knowledge base creation. Connects to Intercom, HubSpot, Guru, Jira, Notion, Slack, and Microsoft 365.

Finance — Journal entry preparation, account reconciliation, financial statement generation, variance analysis, and audit support. Connects to Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Slack, and Microsoft 365.

Legal — Contract review, NDA triage, compliance navigation, risk assessment, and meeting preparation. Connects to Box, Egnyte, Jira, Slack, and Microsoft 365.

Data — SQL query writing, statistical analysis, dashboard building, and data visualization. Connects to Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Hex, Amplitude, and Jira.

Enterprise Search — Unified search across email, chat, docs, and wikis. Connects to Slack, Notion, Guru, Jira, Asana, and Microsoft 365.

Bio Research — Literature search, genomics analysis, and target prioritization. Connects to PubMed, BioRender, bioRxiv, ClinicalTrials.gov, ChEMBL, Synapse, Wiley, Owkin, Open Targets, and Benchling.

Plugin Management — Create new plugins or customize existing ones directly from within Cowork. This is the meta-plugin that lets you build without leaving the tool.

The Enterprise Expansion

In late February 2026, Anthropic expanded the ecosystem significantly with industry-specific plugins and enterprise connectors:

New department plugins now cover HR, design, engineering, operations, and brand voice. Finance got particular attention with specialized variants for investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management — each with domain-specific workflows like analyzing comparable companies, parsing earnings transcripts, or scoring opportunities against investment criteria.

The connector catalog expanded to include Google Workspace (Calendar, Drive, Gmail), DocuSign, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, Similarweb, LegalZoom, FactSet, MSCI, WordPress, and Harvey. Partner-built plugins from Slack (Salesforce), LSEG, S&P Global, and Common Room are also in the pipeline.

Installing and Using Plugins

Installation is straightforward. From within Cowork, you can browse and install plugins directly. For Claude Code users, it's a command-line operation:

# Add the marketplace
claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

# Install a specific plugin
claude plugin install sales@knowledge-work-plugins

Once installed, plugins work in two ways. Skills activate automatically — Claude recognizes when domain expertise is relevant and draws on it without you asking. Commands are explicit — you invoke them when you want a specific workflow.

There's no configuration required for the skills and commands to work. Connectors require a one-time setup to authenticate with your external tools, but the process is guided.

Customizing Plugins for Your Organization

The file-based architecture makes customization accessible to anyone who can edit a text file:

Swap connectors. If your team uses Close instead of HubSpot, edit the .mcp.json file to point to your CRM. The plugin's skills and commands work the same regardless of which specific tool provides the data.

Add company context. Insert your terminology, org structure, naming conventions, and processes into the skill files. A sales plugin that knows your ICP, your pricing model, and your competitive positioning is dramatically more useful than a generic one.

Adjust workflows. Modify the skill instructions to match how your team actually works. If your call prep process has specific steps or your finance team uses particular account structures, encode that into the plugin.

Build entirely new plugins. Use the Plugin Management plugin or follow the standard structure to create plugins from scratch. The format is simple: a plugin.json manifest, a skills/ directory with markdown files, a commands/ directory, and an .mcp.json for connectors.

The Marketplace Model

Anthropic maintains an official marketplace of verified plugins, but the system is deliberately open. Anyone can create a marketplace — it's just a git repository with a manifest file. This enables organizations to build private marketplaces for internal distribution, managing which plugins their teams can access.

For enterprises, this is the governance lever. Instead of every team member installing random plugins, admins can curate an approved set, customize them with company-specific context, and distribute them through a controlled channel.

What This Means for How Teams Work

Plugins shift Cowork from a personal productivity tool to an organizational one. When a sales team shares a customized sales plugin — loaded with their ICP definitions, competitive intel, and call prep process — every team member gets an AI assistant that already understands how the team operates.

The compound effect is significant. New hires get instant access to institutional knowledge encoded in plugin skills. Processes stay consistent because they're defined in shareable, version-controlled files. And as the team learns what works, improvements to the plugin benefit everyone.

The organizations that will get the most from this aren't the ones that install the most plugins. They're the ones that customize thoughtfully — encoding their actual workflows, their real terminology, and their specific standards into the tools their teams use every day.

But this also raises a question: who decides what your AI agents are allowed to do? As plugins connect AI to CRM, financial systems, and customer data, the governance question becomes unavoidable. Each plugin isn't just a productivity tool — it's a new surface area for AI access that needs strategic oversight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Continue Reading

• Claude Cowork: AI That Works With Your Files, Not Just Your Chat — The complete guide to Cowork itself
• Building Custom Cowork Plugins: From Idea to Installation — A practical guide to creating plugins tailored to your organization
• Custom MCP Servers: Building AI Agents That Understand Your Business Context — The protocol layer that powers plugin connectors
• The Four Layers of AI Governance — Why enforcement infrastructure alone isn't enough