Claude Cowork Plugins Explained (& how to build AI employees)
Key Takeaways
The Difference Between Skills and Plugins
Elliot Prince: I've been living inside Claude Co-work for the last two weeks and I'm not even joking — its power is insane. Out the box with no training, it seems to do almost anything. And especially now with it running Opus 4.6 under the hood, the top AI model on the planet right now, it's crazy.
But here's where things got really interesting. What you might not know is Claude have launched something called plugins. And these allow you to train Co-work to do full job roles. We're talking customer support, marketing, sales, product management, anything you can think of with complete access to tools and industry experience.
In this video, I'm going to break everything down — how Claude Skills and Claude plugins work together, how they're different, and then we'll talk about how to install them, and how to build your own from scratch to start automating even more of your business.
Let's take a little step back for a moment, because to understand plugins, we need to understand Claude Skills. Skills have been around for a few months now and they work in the normal chat area of Claude. I've got a whole video on how they work, but a quick précis on that is a skill is a way for you to package your expertise and actually give Claude specific instructions and capabilities.
Whereas normally your LLM is your brain, skills and then plugins actually work as your hands to actually start executing tasks. A skill is just as it sounds — it's the ability to do one particular single task. So it's a set of custom instructions of how to create Word documents, how to write an SEO article, how to generate an invoice. One job, one set of instructions, and that's it. You can think of it like a recipe card for cooking one meal. It always has that one same outcome.
Now, when you think about job roles, they're made up of multiple skills and the ability to use multiple tools, as a human being would do it. You have multiple skills that you use in your job. A plugin is exactly the same scenario. You're able to actually bundle up multiple skills, the ability to use multiple tools, and run them in tandem. Essentially, you can think of it as an entire job function. A plugin is the ability to do an entire job role made up of multiple skills, tools, and connectors.
While they might seem the same, there is an important distinction. You can think of your skills as individual recipe cards — how to do one particular job, how to cook one particular dish. And you can think of your plugins as an experienced chef who knows the whole recipe book. They know which tools to use for which job without being told, and they can work in a team of other chefs and kitchens and connect to other things to actually run a whole restaurant, essentially.
Installing and Using Individual Skills
Let's open up Claude. We're going to be working in the desktop app because we need to access Co-work here to start breaking this down. We were just talking about individual skills that make up plugins. To find individual skills, you need to go into your settings and go down to capabilities. When you scroll down here, you're going to find the skills area of Claude.
These are repeatable custom instructions that Claude can follow in any chat. You can run these at any time in any project, any chat. You'll see here I've got all sorts of things in here that allow the skill to create a branded invoice, that allow it to run SOPs, that allow it to create slide decks, that allow it to write direct response copy. These are all individual processes.
When I actually go into my Co-work chat or my normal chat, I can run these skills very easily. So I could say, "Can you create me a branded invoice for £10 to charge to the King of England, please, based on my hourly rate?" When I do that, you can see I've used the word "branded invoice." And if I hit Let go, you'll see on the right-hand side here it's actually using that branded invoice skill that I've got in my Claude settings to run this.
There are some tricks to activating and running these skills. And if you want to do that, then again, there is a link in the description below where you can start to get that basis to learn about Claude Skills individually.
As I promised, that skill does one thing really well. It creates a perfectly branded invoice on the nose every time to His Majesty King Charles III. There you go. That's a little illustration of Claude Skills.
That's important to understand because when we talk about plugins, we're going to start bundling all of these together to create full job roles. When you think about someone who might create an invoice, well, that's not their only function. They might be in charge of the finance department. They might have a whole range of financial activities and tools they want to use. We can use plugins to recreate that job role.
Exploring and Installing Plugins
If we go back into Co-work here, instead of going into capabilities and skills, we actually want to go to this plugins tab on the left-hand side. When we open plugins, this is where the magic really comes to life. You can extend how Claude performs tasks with ready-to-use workflows from plugins, and we can customise them and build them ourselves.
When you open plugins up, you get this "Browse plugins" area and you get some default off-the-shelf ones from Claude. You can see here we've got bio research, we've got data, we've got legal, we've got a marketing plugin. These are all functions of any business. And of course, we just made an invoice. We've got a finance one here that we could go and install.
When we hit install, it then is available for us to use in our Claude Co-work area. Before you start using it as well, you can hit "Manage" and start digging into what actually is inside — what are the files, instructions, and abilities of this plugin.
The finance plugin here allows you to ask questions like "prepare month-end accrual journal entries," "reconcile subledger balances," "walk me through month-end close." This is stuff probably way over my head that I would pay a bookkeeper or an accountant to do. Now I can just get Claude to do it for me. You can easily run these tasks by just using these shortcut commands.
Plus, below this, you'll see the skills that are packaged up into this plugin. Before we were only running an invoice skill. This plugin now has six skills bundled in there to work in tandem — auditing, close management, financial statements, reconciliation, all run within this.
Then we can go on the left-hand side here. We can click "Commands" and see the different options and the different things, the tasks that this plugin can do. We can see connectors. Connectors allow us not only to work within Claude but we can get these workers, these plugins, to actually reach outside. So this finance plugin is set up so it can access Snowflake, Databricks, Google Cloud BigQuery, Slack, MS365.
Of course, if you don't do a lot of finance, you can go and add whatever plugins you want to your workspace. We could go again. We could say "Browse plugins," go back to the Anthropic area — and I'm going to show you how to add more as well as we go through this — and we could go for something like marketing. Let's install the marketing plugin there.
Running a Marketing Plugin in Practice
When we go back to our main area of Co-work, to activate a plugin, go to the plus button in the middle here. Go down to plugins. Then you'll start to see the ones that are available. You can see on the right-hand side you can see the different commands to activate different tasks for this plugin, or we can see the skills as well that actually run within it.
Let's say we want to write an email sequence, right? And then we get the command come up. You can remember these commands as well and you can write your prompts so that Claude might actually activate all of this stuff automatically as well.
I'm going to say, "Can you write a welcome sequence for people that sign up to my AI recipe vault?" And now you'll see Claude start to run these plugins and skills to actually complete this task. So it's acting as my marketer, finding all the bits to its email sequencing abilities, and then it's going to hopefully produce us a nice output.
One little trick I've done in here as well while we're here is I've actually linked it to my Claude projects on the right-hand side here, which while we let that run I'll show you how to do that. If you've got Claude projects and you want them to run in Co-work, then you can go back into the normal area of your chat, you can select the project you actually want to run, and then you can hit "Start task in Co-work." That's going to launch that project and all that data to work with in your Co-work area.
Back over here, we're actually loading up our plugins with that particular project as well to get an even more tailored output for my audience, seeing as AI Elliot knows everything about my business.
The final result — for us mere mortals in this world who aren't copywriting or full-stack marketers, but we're still trying to grow our own thing in this world — the output is insane. Look at this. We've got seven emails over 14 days that deliver a connect-value-bridge-pitch framework. Even the planning alone is useful, let alone the actual execution. You can see all this stuff. It's packed in here.
Let's view the actual output we've got then, which has been put into a file. We could get this into a Word document. We could connect it up to Mailchimp or ConvertKit to actually schedule all of this as well if we needed.
At the moment, my email welcome sequence is super short. It's "here's your AI recipe vault, get whatever you need, and thank you very much." And then I send a welcome email. This now breaks it down even further. It gives me more in my AI recipe vault, like how to actually use this, which I dropped the ball on. It then builds in the story about the turning point and how I really finally got AI to click in my business and did five days' work in eight hours. This is all stuff from my original context in my project.
We've got value ads in here about how I work — just pure value, some mindset shift. This goes on and on, bridge, and actually goes on to pitch an offer. I don't have an offer to pitch. I'm not trying to sell anything at the moment, but if I did, it would be pitching it in the last email there.
Insane. We've got a full-stack marketer ready to go and ready to rock for our business. Insane.
Customising Existing Plugins
Of course, this might not be perfect for you. You might think, "Actually, I wish it could do this or I wish my new plugin employee could do something else." Well, that's fine, because we can go back into our plugins area and we can actually go to the "Customise" button. This is where we can start making improvements.
Again, customise the marketing plugin for my company. How could I improve it to suit my business? Let's see what Claude actually comes up with. Again, we're using the biggest AI hack available — using AI to improve the AI that we have. Again, it's going to go dig into my business context and think about some actionable recommendations.
Again, this stuff is so powerful that I sometimes think, what should or how could I be using this? Let's give AI the context to give it some ideas.
I want to say my content atomiser skill that helps find different angles and break and repurpose content into different forms like LinkedIn posts, emails — I want that to be part of my marketing plugin. So I can give it a script. It can atomise the content and then go and use the email writing skill, for example.
You can easily go and customise your plugins just by hitting the customise button and just talking and asking and adding things on.
Adding Plugins from External Sources
The other thing we can do is create our own plugins or add them from other sources. If we go back to "Browse plugins," originally we were on Anthropic. Now we can go to "Personal" and start adding our own from outside the Anthropic layer.
If we hit the plus button again, you can add from a marketplace, from GitHub, you can add it from a URL. So someone gives you a URL and says, "Hey, look at all these plugins I made," you can just plug that into Claude and download them from there, or you can upload them yourself.
For example, if I go to "Add marketplace from GitHub" and I go to one like this Awesome Claude Plugins, we could actually grab the URL or the end of the URL here and actually add it in and hit sync. Once the link to that marketplace loads, we can then choose from all of these ones. This is Awesome Claude Plugins that we can go and start adding in. Again, just hit install and then it's ready to go. You can manage it within your Claude desktop here easily.
Building Your Own Plugins with Claude
The final piece of this is just building your own plugins, because there's not that many marketplaces and not that many good ones available that I found yet, because this stuff is so new. You might think, well, I just want to build this for myself.
Again, we can go to "Personal plugins" and you can hit "Upload plugin," but you need something to upload first. We can create with Claude. Yes, that's right. Claude can build its own plugins.
Let's come up with some ideas then that we should build for. And again, I'm using one of my projects to actually add context. So when I say, "What are some good ideas for my business?" it has tonnes of information and knowledge about what I do, how I do it. As you can see, it's researching and finding out who I am, and it's going to ask me some questions about what I want to achieve.
Let's say we want to do sales and lead gen. "What kind of plugin output would be most valuable to you?" Let's say Notion content. I love working in Notion. So we're going to use that as a connector built into our plugin, I would imagine.
Some of these ideas are better than others. I'd love a lead magnet launch kit with all the skills and links to Notion that could actually just build even landing pages, copies, build out email sequences, everything that we've just talked about — build it all into a lead magnet launch kit.
Let's say, "Build it for me, please."
You can see the depth. The more you start working with, the more you add, the more context, the more skills, the more plugins you add, the more depth that platforms like Co-work are going into, which is just incredible when you link it with all of its other power.
While I went off and made a cup of tea, it built the plugin for me here. And even better, we don't even have to download and upload it. I can hit "Save plugin" and it's ready to go.
You'll see what it does here. What does it do? I give it a topic and who it's for. It's going to build the full funnel for either a digital product or a lead magnet. So it's going to concept it. It's going to outline landing page copy, the email welcome sequence, and distribution checklist. All the copy is going to be written in reference to my project if I've got a project on.
We should see that plugin now in my — here we go, lead magnet launch kit. We should see that ready to go in my plugins there. It's very simple, very quick output, but it shows you how quickly you can create these based on your ideas yourself.
It's that easy to get started. Once you understand the mechanics behind this, you can kind of get Co-work to do a lot of the work itself.
Guys, if you're struggling with any of this, if you just want a breakdown of how to get started with Claude Co-work, some of the use cases, there are videos and links in the description which are going to help walk you through all of this process.