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Cowork Can Run 5 Back-Office Jobs. Two It Shouldn’t.
A 3-question readiness test, run against five common jobs — three are safe to hand over, two will cost you.
Three of these five back-office jobs you can hand to Claude’s Cowork and stop thinking about. Two will quietly cost you more than the hire you were trying to skip.
Free: the Build-vs-Buy Decision Guide — the one-page test I use for where AI pays off and where it doesn’t.
Cowork is Anthropic’s desktop agent. It reads and writes the files on your machine, runs on a schedule, and reaches your other tools through connectors — that’s Anthropic’s own description of it. Since June 5 the 5-hour usage limits are doubled at no charge through July 5 (The New Stack), so a lot of operators are about to point it at real work for the first time.
The question was never whether it can do these jobs. It’s which ones you can leave it alone to do. Here’s the test I give every team that asks.
The Unattended Test: a job has to pass all three questions
Hand Cowork a job unattended only when you can answer yes to all three:
- Is it bounded? Clear inputs, a clear “done.”
- Can you check the output in seconds, not hours?
