Claude Cowork’s biggest use case is the mundane office work nobody wants to own, Anthropic says

Anthropic analyzed 1.2 million Claude Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations. About half of all usage goes toward business processes and text creation, what Anthropic calls “the work around the work.” That means tasks like compiling status reports, building onboarding checklists, or putting together slide decks.

The analysis draws on a sample of 1.2 million anonymized sessions from May 11 to 31, 2026, spanning more than 600,000 organizations. An automated system assigned each session to one of 20 work categories. According to Anthropic, about half of Cowork usage goes toward what the company calls “the work around the work,” tasks that are rarely anyone’s core responsibility but come with virtually every office job. The largest category is “Business process and operations” at 33.4 percent. Anthropic says this includes things like pulling scattered status updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, or reconciling spreadsheets. Second is “Content creation and copywriting” at 16.4 percent, covering drafts, slide decks, posts, and proposals. Together, these two broad categories account for the “roughly half” Anthropic describes.Ad Anthropic describes these activities as “connective in nature.” Spreadsheets pull scattered data into one place, slide decks translate a decision for audiences with varying levels of background knowledge, and onboarding checklists give new hires access to an organization’s institutional knowledge.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 The remaining categories are much smaller. Software development accounts for 8.7 percent, DevOps and infrastructure for 7 percent, research for 6.4 percent, data analysis for 5.8 percent, document processing for 4.1 percent, and sales operations for 4 percent. Personal assistance sits at 3.8 percent, education at 2.4 percent, and meeting analysis at 1.8 percent. Cowork handles the peripheral stuff while Claude Code does the technical work The low share of coding confirms Anthropic’s thesis that the interface plays a major role in how people adopt AI models. Developers still use Claude Code to build, debug, and ship software, according to Anthropic. In Cowork, they handle the communication tasks that surround their work instead.Ad This pattern tracks with experience. After Claude Code launched in 2025, a surprisingly large number of non-technical users showed up in the terminal, organizing folders, removing duplicate files, and writing spreadsheet formulas. For others, the terminal stayed a black box. Cowork was designed to bring those same agent-like capabilities to a familiar chat interface.