Anthropic on Tuesday introduced new Claude Cowork plugins and connectors, after its previous release shook up the legal information services market. The update shows the generative AI vendor’s determination to target other professional services areas and serve as an enterprise model provider.
With the update, Anthropic said enterprises can build a private marketplace for specialized AI agents in Claude Cowork and distribute them across their organizations. Admins can set up plugins from starter templates or create them from scratch with a new menu called Customize. They also control which plugins their teams can access, including organization-specific marketplaces, private GitHub repositories and plugin sources.
Anthropic also built connectors to applications such as Google Workspace, DocuSign, WordPress and LegalZoom; and it expanded its library of prebuilt plugin templates to include HR, design, engineering, operations, brand voice, and investment and equity research.
The update comes nearly three weeks after the initial Cowork plugins release triggered a plunge in stock prices of legal industry software providers. That disruption showed how AI technology is affecting knowledge workers and the shift underway as AI tools are replacing some entry-level work. This is because AI tools automate routine tasks and augment high-level roles. This disruption is not solely due to Anthropic. For example, after the open source AI agent framework OpenClaw rose to prominence, leading SaaS providers saw a rapid drop in their stock prices.
“The decline in market valuation of the SaaS market shows that the market truly believes that AI technology is now ready to take over some of the more manual tasks in the professional service space,” said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
The market decline is also a signal to Anthropic that it has an opportunity to cater to professional services companies since the work is labor-intensive, and high-level work can be augmented by AI.
“The amount of savings that you can incur by automating some of the processes is actually quite significant,” Su said. “It allows Anthropic to showcase the ROI in a much better way compared to some of the other [applications of AI].”
Anthropic’s latest move is also a sign of its continued focus on the enterprise and on providing an alternative in the market to an open source system like OpenClaw, which is now part of Anthropic rival OpenAI, Su added. He added that the plugins show how Anthropic appears to be capitalizing on OpenClaw’s virality and providing an alternative.
However, Anthropic must still compete with other big tech vendors, such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, which also serve professional services industries.
