Stop working task by task. Start working in parallel with AI.

Stop working task by task. Start working in parallel.

This is the new operational advantage. Your team can now work like a C-suite executive — multiple projects in flight, guided by your direction. Even individual contributors can have a team, albeit of digital employees. This is real. It's here now.

Anthropic's Claude Cowork agent makes this workflow real on any platform where you can run Claude and point it at your work context — and it was recently added to Windows on February 10, 2026 (download here). Paired with 11 new open source plugins for sales, marketing, and finance, Cowork acts less like a chatbot and more like a team of analysts. You spend less time doing and more time framing, reviewing, and redirecting. Though you could do this with other tools, Cowork makes it seamless.

Investors just wiped $285 billion off software stocks after Cowork's debut. They see what's coming: a move from using AI as a tool to collaborating with it as a workforce. You stop doing. You start directing.

Here’s a real-world example. I recently co-produced a ~4,000-person conference. We wanted to post the slides. I could have manually updated them to Slideshare or another service, then created the links.

What I did instead was link to the shared Google Drive where the slides were and asked Claude Cowork to write a custom website that would give me an index, create thumbnails, crosslink to a directory, and publish all the slides that speakers had shared. Here’s what I got: https://allthingsai.org/sessions.

Honestly, I didn’t write any code, I didn’t open the PowerPoint files, I didn’t add the metadata, and I didn’t edit the links. I just explained what I wanted done, and it did it. Then I tweaked a few things, and it was done in about 30 minutes of my time and all under my Claude Max subscription. The alternative, pay a contractor or do it myself, and it would have far exceeded the cost of my $200/month subscription.

Get a feel for this new work mode in the next 10 minutes. This isn't about finishing a task faster; it's about changing how you start.

Note: Cowork requires a Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise plan.

Get access to Cowork (via Claude) and give it a dedicated project folder with a few non-sensitive files.

Start three separate conversations with Claude, one for each file. Ask it to summarize a report, outline a presentation from a blog post, and identify three trends in a CSV. Don't wait for one to finish; start all three.

After a few minutes, jump back into the first conversation. Use this prompt to get back up to speed instantly.

So if you start a bunch of tasks in Cowork you may lose your place. But I just do this to get instant context when jumping between parallel tasks.

Asana's Anatomy of Work Index, a survey of 10,000+ global knowledge workers. Asana found that knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on "work about work" — tasks like chasing status updates, attending unnecessary meetings, and switching between tools — rather than on the skilled work they were hired to do.

Parallel work flips this ratio. By offloading execution to an agent team, you reclaim that time for strategic direction.

Your move: Audit your department's software subscriptions. Ask your team which single-purpose tools they would replace with a smart assistant that could access their files. You'll have your 2026 budget priorities in a day.

I appreciate your support.