Claude Code & Cowork for Business

About the Course:

This 1-hour & 30-minute live session is a high-impact, practitioner-focused course designed for business professionals across Finance, Operations, Strategy, and Leadership who want to use Anthropic's Claude AI platform, specifically Claude Cowork and Claude Code, to make faster decisions, automate the work that consumes their best analysts, and build an AI-enabled organisation fit for 2026.

Business teams today are buried in a paradox: they have more data than ever, more reporting obligations than ever, and more stakeholders demanding sharper insights, but the same number of hours in a week. Finance teams spend days preparing monthly board packs. Operations teams manually track vendor performance across scattered documents. Strategy teams repeat the same competitive research every quarter. Leadership teams receive reports that are already two weeks old by the time they read them.

Claude Cowork changes this. With pre-built plugins for Financial Analysis, Operations, and cross-app workflows spanning Excel and PowerPoint, Claude can do in minutes what used to take analysts days, building financial models, synthesising competitive intelligence, drafting board reports, and automating recurring business processes. And crucially, it connects directly to the tools your business already runs on: Gmail, FactSet, Slack, DocuSign, and more.

This course is the definitive getting-started experience for business professionals who want to move from AI curiosity to AI adoption, with working workflows, live demonstrations, and a clear 30-day action plan they can execute immediately.

Why This Course?

Every business function, finance, operations, strategy, procurement, and leadership has a version of the same problem: too much analytical grunt work, not enough time for the judgment calls that actually move the business forward.

The Business Intelligence Bottleneck

Senior business professionals are routinely asked to produce insights that require hours of data assembly, synthesis, and formatting before a single analytical thought is possible. A CFO needs a board pack by Monday. An Operations Director needs a vendor scorecard by the end of the week. A Strategy lead needs a competitive landscape updated before the quarterly business review. These are valuable outputs, but the process of creating them consumes talent that should be reserved for interpreting results, not compiling them.

Business Task (Old Way)

• Monthly board pack: 2-3 days of analyst time
• Quarterly competitive landscape: 1 full day
• Vendor evaluation summary: 4-6 hours
• Financial model (DCF or 3-statement): 4-8 hours
• Weekly ops report compiled from 5 systems
• Post-meeting action log and follow-up email

With Claude Cowork

• Claude drafts the full deck from your data sources in under an hour
• Claude synthesises web research, internal docs, and news into a structured report in minutes
• Claude reads all proposal documents and produces a scored comparison matrix automatically
• Claude builds a fully formatted Excel model with sensitivity tables in under 30 minutes
• Claude pulls from connected tools and drafts the report every Monday morning automatically
• Claude extracts actions from meeting notes and drafts follow-ups in 2 minutes

Why the Business Plugins Are Different

Unlike generic AI tools, Claude Cowork comes with pre-built plugins for Financial Analysis, Operations, and broader business workflows, each designed with practitioners in that field. The Financial Analysis plugin builds DCF models, comparable company analyses, and three-statement financial models directly in Excel. The Operations plugin handles process documentation, vendor evaluations, and change request tracking. And because Claude Cowork passes full context between Excel and PowerPoint, a business analysis can flow seamlessly from a spreadsheet model into a board-ready presentation without losing a single assumption.

This course gives business professionals the exact setup, the exact workflows, and the exact prompts to start realising that value from Day 1.

Why Now?

Agentic AI for business teams is not a future capability; it is a present reality. The organisations moving fastest in 2026 are not the ones with the biggest IT budgets; they are the ones where business leaders understand what these tools can do and give their teams permission to use them.

The Business AI Timeline: 2026

• January 2026: Anthropic launches Claude Cowork in research preview for knowledge workers. Finance, strategy, and operations teams, watching Claude Code transform software development, immediately begin piloting Cowork for their own analytical workflows.
• January 2026: Anthropic open-sources the Sales, Finance, Operations, and other business plugins. The Financial Analysis plugin becomes the most-installed, with teams at major enterprises using it to build Excel models and PowerPoint board packs in single sessions.
• February 2026: Anthropic launches 10+ enterprise connectors, Gmail, FactSet, MSCI, DocuSign, Similarweb, and partner plugins from S&P Global, LSEG, and PwC. Claude Cowork is now directly embedded in the enterprise data stack that finance and operations teams rely on daily.
• February 2026: Claude gains the ability to pass full context between Excel and PowerPoint in a single session, eliminating the most painful manual step in the finance and strategy workflow: reformatting analysis for executive presentation.
• April 2026: You are here. PwC, NYSE, Thomson Reuters, and Epic are already building Claude into their core business workflows. The enterprises that move now build a 6-12 month advantage in AI-enabled business processes before these capabilities become table stakes.

The Strategic Cost of Delay

When Wall Street Prep benchmarked Claude against Microsoft Copilot in early 2026, Claude scored 5.5 out of 10 versus Copilot's 4.4, leading in speed, intent understanding, and income statement forecasting. The tools are already enterprise-grade. The question is not readiness, it is adoption.

Business teams that spend another quarter manually building board packs and researching competitors while AI-enabled peers do it in a fraction of the time are not just losing hours; they are losing competitive clarity, decision speed, and analyst capacity. The cost of inaction compounds every month.

Course Objectives:

By the end of this 1-hour & 30-minute live session, participants will be able to:

• Understand AI's role in modern business - Distinguish Claude Chat, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, and build a clear mental model for which tool fits which business function and scenario.
• Configure Claude Cowork for your business - Install Claude Desktop, activate Cowork, set up the Financial Analysis and Operations plugins, and connect Gmail and relevant data sources for your team.
• Automate core finance and FP&A workflows - Use Claude to build financial models in Excel, create variance analyses, draft board reports, and generate management commentary in a fraction of the time a traditional approach requires.
• Accelerate operations and strategy work - Delegate vendor evaluation, competitive intelligence, process documentation, project status reports, and strategic briefings to Claude, and receive polished, business-ready deliverables.
• Drive Excel-to-PowerPoint workflows - Use Claude's cross-app context to take a financial analysis in Excel and turn it directly into a board-ready PowerPoint presentation, without reformatting a single chart manually.
• Build automated business intelligence cadences - Configure scheduled tasks so Claude automatically generates weekly pipeline health summaries, monthly management reports, and real-time competitive digests, delivered to your team without manual effort.
• Lead responsible AI adoption for your organisation - Apply the right governance framework: which outputs require human review, how to handle sensitive financial and business data, and how to build a private AI plugin marketplace for your team.

What Success Looks Like

• A successful participant leaves this session with Claude Cowork installed, the Financial Analysis and Operations plugins active, and the confidence to delegate their next financial model, board pack, or competitive analysis to Claude and have it come back as a finished, professional deliverable ready for review.

Who is the Target Audience?

This course is designed for business professionals across finance, operations, strategy, and leadership. No technical or coding background is required, only a drive to make better decisions faster.

• Finance Professionals & FP&A Analysts - Those who build financial models, prepare management accounts, run budget variance analyses, and support business planning cycles, and who want to use Claude to compress the model-building and report-drafting process from days to hours.
• CFOs & Finance Directors - Senior finance leaders responsible for board reporting, financial strategy, and investor communications who want to understand how Claude Cowork can elevate their team's output quality and speed without increasing headcount.
• Operations Managers & COOs - Business operations professionals who manage vendor relationships, process documentation, project tracking, and cross-functional coordination, and who want to automate the reporting and documentation that consumes their team's capacity.
• Strategy & Business Development Professionals - Those who lead competitive intelligence, market analysis, strategic planning, and M&A research, and who want to use Claude to synthesise larger volumes of information into sharper strategic insights faster.
• Business Owners & General Managers - Leaders of SMEs and business units who wear multiple hats across finance, operations, and strategy, and who want a single AI tool that can handle a wide range of business tasks without requiring a large team or technical resources.
• Business Analysts & Management Consultants - Analysts who spend the majority of their time on data gathering, slide production, and report writing, and who want to use Claude to accelerate the analytical legwork so they can spend more time on interpretation and recommendation.

Basic Knowledge:

Technical Prerequisites

• Participants are expected to arrive with the following:
• A laptop or desktop running macOS or Windows (Linux is not supported for Cowork at this time).
• A Claude account, a free account, is sufficient to follow along; a Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise plan is required to use Cowork independently after the session.
• Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is accessible on your machine for the financial modelling exercise.
• Access to a folder of business documents (financial reports, operational data, board presentations) for the live exercise.
• Google Chrome browser installed (recommended for the best Cowork experience with web-based connectors).

Conceptual Foundations

No prior AI experience is required. The following concepts will be briefly covered at the session's start, but reviewing them in advance will help participants move faster during live exercises.

• Claude Cowork - Anthropic's agentic desktop AI that completes multi-step business tasks autonomously, reading local files, connecting to external tools, and delivering finished professional work without manual coordination.
• Financial Analysis Plugin - A pre-built Cowork plugin with skills for building DCF models, comparable company analyses, three-statement financials, and variance reports directly in Excel, with built-in connectors for FactSet, MSCI, and S&P Global.
• Operations Plugin - A pre-built Cowork plugin designed for process documentation, vendor evaluations, change request tracking, runbook creation, and operational reporting, the administrative backbone of any business team.
• Cross-App Context - Claude Cowork's ability to carry the full context of an analysis from Excel into PowerPoint in a single session, allowing a financial model to flow directly into a board-ready presentation without reformatting.
• MCP Connector - The integration layer that allows Claude to read from and write to your business tools, Gmail, FactSet, DocuSign, and Slack, so it can complete end-to-end workflows across your existing data stack.

Pre-Session Checklist

• Download Claude Desktop from claude.com/download before the session starts
• Create or log in to your Claude account at claude.com
• Have a real financial report, board deck, or operational document ready for the live exercise
• Ensure your folder with business documents is accessible
• Join the session on a device where you can simultaneously use Claude for hands-on practice