Cowork
Also: Claude Cowork
Cowork is the agentic work mode in the Claude desktop app — the tab between Chat and Code. Where Chat is a back-and-forth conversation, Cowork is delegation: you describe an outcome, Claude plans the steps, works through them, and delivers a finished file to your drive. It reads and writes real files in a folder you point it at, connects to your tools (Slack, Drive, Gmail, Calendar), and keeps working on longer tasks while you step away. Use Cowork when the task needs your files, your connected tools, or a real output file. Use Chat when you're thinking something through or everything fits in a paste. A few practical things to know: Cowork uses more of your plan allocation than Chat — match your model to the task (Sonnet is the right default, Opus only for genuinely complex multi-step work). Sleeping your computer is fine during a long task; quitting the app pauses it. Conversation history is stored locally on your machine, which matters for compliance-sensitive workloads. Projects in Cowork are local to your desktop with memory scoped to that project — different from Claude.ai Projects, which sync in the cloud.
In practice
Your team is workshopping a product strategy. Instead of one person running Claude and sharing the screen, you open a Cowork session — everyone joins the same Claude conversation, can read the thread, and ask Claude questions in real time. It's Claude as a shared thinking partner for group work rather than a solo tool.
Related concepts