Transcription
Last week, Anthropic dropped something that sent software stocks into an almost $300 billion freefall. Legal, tech, finance, SAS, investors [music] panicked. And the thing that caused all this? Plugins for Claude. Co-work plugins let you turn Claude into a specialist for a specific job. So, sales, legal, finance, marketing, product development, uh, productivity, your assistant with a single install. No coding is required.
So, in this video, I'm going to explain exactly what Anthropic's new plugins are, how they're different from Claude Skills, walk you through seven of the 11 official plugins that Anthropic just released, and show you real business use cases so that you can start using this today.
Okay, so what exactly are Anthropic's new plugins? Well, before plugins make any sense, you need to understand Claude Co-work, which I did a whole video on about 2 weeks ago right here on the channel. So, a plugin bundles together things like skills, commands, connectors, and manifest. It basically tells Claude how you like work done for a specific type of role, which tools and data to pull from, how to handle critical workflows, and what slash commands to expose. Think of it like this: Plugins are simply a set of prompts, configurations, context files, and system instructions that tell Claude how to approach a specific workflow in your business. But here's the thing, it's really nothing new, but Anthropic packaging them as plugins or bundles, if you will, is brilliant.
And a lot of people are asking, what's the difference between Cloud Skills and these plugins? Well, notice that skills are just one element of a plug-in. So, skills are a single piece of expertise, one workflow. You get to train Claude on one thing, where plugins are a complete role package. You get multiple skills, commands, tool connections, and you get to train Claude for an entire job function. And here's why this matters for business owners: Number one, they're pre-built expertise, if you will. Anthropic's already created 11 different plugins that you can just go and use right away. They're ready for us to use. Number two, they're completely customizable, so you can swap in connectors for your tools and your company context. Number three, there's no coding required. You don't need to be a coder or a developer to not only use the plugins but also create your own. There's just markdown and JSON files. Anyone can edit them. Number four, they're cross-functional. So you can share plugins across teams within Claude if you have a Cloud Teams plan so that there's consistent organizational knowledge. Number five, they're agentic. Claude doesn't just answer questions, it completes entire projects for you now.
Okay, so let's look at some plugins for some common business use cases. And the first one I want to talk about is customer support. And to access your plugins, you just go into Claude. So I'm in Co-work right now. You can go down to the bottom left-hand corner. There's a couple different ways to access these. If you go down to the bottom left-hand corner, click on plugins. You just click on the plus button and go to browse plugins. And you can see here you have the ones by Anthropic. These are the ones that are just plug-and-play. You install it and they're good to go. They're already pre-built. You can add a marketplace from GitHub. You can see the owner and the repo. But you can go to add marketplace by URL. So if somebody's created different plugins on GitHub, for example, you can add a marketplace by URL. Also, you can create your own plugins, which we will do in today's video where you can just upload them uh right here. So you can scroll through bio, research, customer support, data, enterprise search, finance, legal, marketing, product management, productivity, and sales. And we're going to go through um a bunch of these here today.
So the first one here is customer support. Now, I've already added that one to my Claude Co-work, which is why you see manage. But if you haven't added it yet, when you mouse over, you'll see the word install, and you just you just click that. So, after you install it, it gives you a snapshot of what it can do. So, basically, the customer support plugin can triage tickets, triage and prioritize an incoming ticket, research a customer issue across all of the sources that you've given it access to. It can draft a response to a customer issue, and then within each of these plugins, they have sort of keyboard shortcuts, if you will, or slash commands. So, for example, draft a response or research or triage a bunch of emails.
So, once we've installed the customer support plugin, we obviously want to customize it and personalize it to our own business. We want to connect it to the tools that we use. So, what we can do here is we can come down to the plus button, go to plugins, and choose customer support. Now, if I choose this, I can also do the commands and also it'll show you what the skills are. If you mouse over, it'll tell you exactly what the skill is designed to do and focus on. So, let's just choose customer support. And I'm going to type in "Customize the customer support plugin for my company." That's all I'm doing. And it's going to walk me through exactly what kind of information it wants from me in order to customize the plugin specifically for my business. So, you can see here it's reading through the plugin, understand the structure first. So now it's going to take you through a series of questions so that again it can personalize and customize the plugin specifically to you, how you work, your specific workflow and your business. So again, what this plugin and all these plugins are doing is it allowing you to work within your business and have virtual employees. So in this case here, a customer service person, for example, all within Claude. So you don't have to go into five different tools to get things done.
Now, before the next use case, I want to show you a tool I've personally been using. Because as much as I love being a content creator, staying on top of every piece of trending AI news is pretty chaotic and time-consuming. That's where our sponsor Recall has completely changed how I work. Every morning, I'm diving into podcasts, articles, emails, YouTube videos for content ideas. And instead of frantically taking notes, I save everything to Recall with one click using the browser extension. I get an instant summary and can even chat directly with the content to pull out key points. Recall automatically organizes everything. I don't have to think about folders or tagging. It just works. And here's where it gets even more powerful. Beyond just saving content, I take all my notes inside Recall, too. Journals, content ideas, everything in one place. So, when I'm prepping content, I can just ask Recall something like, "Pull insights from the business podcast that I save, combine them with my personal goals, and tell me what to focus on next." It gives you my curated knowledge, not generic AI advice. So, I want to invite you to try Recall for free at getrecall.ai or use code rick25 for 25% off the unlimited plan.
Okay, for this next plugin, we're going to talk about Anthropic's marketing plugins. So, I've not installed this yet. So, I'm going to install it right now and we'll look at the process. It'll give you a heads up that it is already installed. So, I'm going to click on manage. So, again, this is a complete overview of what the plug-in can do. So, as you can see, it'll draft blog posts. It'll generate full campaign briefs with objectives. It'll review content against your brand, voice, style guide, messaging pillars. It'll research competitors. It essentially becomes a marketing department for you. Again, customized to exactly what your business is about, the specific context that you want it trained on, and the type of workflows that you do for marketing in your business. And the marketing plug-in works with the following tools through the MCP connections that are already made between Claude and these tools: So, Slack, Canva, Figma, HubSpot, Amplitude, Notion, Hrefs, Similar Web, Clavio. And again, you can customize these. So, basically, you don't have to use these specific tools if you use different tools in your business. So, I can say, "I want to customize the marketing plugin with the tools that I use in my business." So again, as you can see here, it's reading through the plugin and the documentation, if you will, that's already pre-built into the plugin. It's going through and analyzing what it already knows about me from my using Claude, and it's saying, "Okay, let me ask you a few questions to fill in the gap." So, this is it makes it so easy to customize these plugins for your specific, the tools that you use in your business and how your workflows are set up.
For this next use case and plugin, Anthropic has created a productivity plugin, and this is all about task management, workplace memory, and it creates a visual dashboard for you. So, here's a visual snapshot of what this plugin does. So, again, task management, you can add tasks naturally. You like you can just tell, I'll show you in just a second. You can just tell it what you want it to do. Claude will go and execute it. It'll track the status and the progress of your tasks and projects. It'll triage stale items to bring them to the front to let you know what's going on. Again, it creates this workplace memory, if you will. So, it learns your shorthand. It'll understand the people, the projects, the terminology that you've got going in your business, and it dynamically updates and gets smarter. And then also, it'll create this visual dashboard for you. So, it's a local HTML file interface, and it's giving you a live view of Claude's knowledge of your tasks and projects. It's really cool. So, I've already installed the productivity plugin. So, I can click on manage. Here you can see a list of tools that are already included in this plugin. Again, you can customize if you don't use Monday or ClickUp or what have you. You can customize that. And with the memory management, like we were talking about, again, Claude is getting smarter and smarter and smarter the more that you use it. So again, let's go over to our chat window. We can click on the plus button. We can click on plugins. We can go to the productivity one. We can click on start. And you can see the command that it puts in there. It says, "Let's go." And this is what you want to do to start to set up the productivity plugin so that it's most useful for you and again, your specific workflows, your specific tools that you use. It's telling me, "Okay, cool. No productivity files exist yet. Let me create everything to get you started." So, it's creating all of the necessary files and folders on my computer locally on my hard drive, and I don't have to do any of this. It's doing it all for me. And it gives you an update on what it's doing. So, it's created the entire productivity system with the task.md file, the dashboard.html, and the memory directory all created on my computer. And then here they are already created. I didn't do any of this. Dashboard.html, memory, the memory folder. So, context, people, and projects. I would I'm going to want to go in and give Claude this information or give Claude access to this information. And again, it will populate the necessary files and folders with the information that I give it. I don't have to do all this moving around myself. And here's an example of the dashboard that it just created for me. Now, I can totally go in and customize this within the HTML if I want to, but I can just say, "This is a task right there." Cool. Again, you can add notes, you can add subtasks all right in here. And again, Claude is now your project manager, if you will, keeping track of all these things, giving you a dashboard whenever you want to go into it to give you a snapshot of what's going on in terms of tasks and projects in your business.
But the next use case and plugin that Anthropic has already created for us is the sales plugin. So if I go down here to the plus button, go to plugins again, add plugin. If you scroll down here, you'll see it right here. So I can click on install. And again, it'll give me a complete overview of what this plugin does. So as you can see here, it will do a lot of different things. It'll help you with prospecting, outreach, pipeline management, call prep, deal strategy. It'll work as a standalone asset for you in terms of you put in your manual input to go research things, but even better, they call it supercharge mode. So, this is where you connect your CRM, your email, other tools that you use in your business from a from a sales perspective. So, with the supercharge mode, that's where it really gets powerful. So, again, it'll do account research, call prep, daily briefing for you. It'll draft the outreach for you. So, you can see here, it'll research the project, draft personalized emails, LinkedIn messages, what have you. It'll do competitive intelligence. It'll create different assets for you: landing page, decks, one-pagers. This is really where it gets into your proactive sales team for your business that you can completely customize.
All right, for this next use case, let's just say we want to create our own custom plugin, one that's not already in the list of pre-made plugins. And two videos ago, when I did the Co-work video here on the channel, I talked about creating a content flywheel. And here's what it looks like. And this is what I shared on that video. So it basically for me personally, it takes raw input. So customer feedback that comes into a Google Sheet. So for example, when people join my school community, one of the first things I ask them are, "What are three things that they want to get out of the community?" Well then I can use that knowledge not only to improve the community but also create content specifically for the issues and challenges that people coming into the community are facing. So it will read and analyze that. It'll look at my past work, my past content, my past examples for style and history. It'll read my preferences and style guide for my writing style, my tone, the types of rules that I have when when creating content. And this is the big thing: it has persistent memory. So, the brain, if you will, of this plugin is it's looking at what I've already created, coming up with new ideas, so that also it does not repeat any type of content that I've done prior. And then it gives me the creative outputs and it'll give me YouTube ideas, it'll give me email newsletter ideas, it'll give me social media content ideas. Basically, the AI is learning and remembering my specific context for smarter generation of content. So, in order to create something like this, if you want to create a custom plugin for yourself, you can just come in to Co-work here and just say, "Please help me create a custom plugin for my business." And then what it's going to do, it's going to ask you a whole series of questions and it will tell you what files it needs. It'll ask you what tools you want to connect to. And then, as you can see here, it's going to ask you a series of questions like, "What would you like this plugin to help you accomplish?" And then here's the plugin that it created for me once I went through all these steps. It's giving me a series of commands. So, if I go in here, it breaks down exactly what each of these commands does for you. So, analyzing member feedback. So, it'll go through, I've assigned it to the Google Sheet where all this information is coming into dynamically updating. By the way, here's the flywheel essentially. So this is what it's doing in terms of gathering the information, researching, analyzing, and then coming up with the different ideas. And then also it will track the status of the different content that we are creating. Again, creating this entire system right here just by explaining to Claude what it is that I wanted to create.
Okay, for this next use case and plugin, this is the one that caused the market crash, if you will, over the last week or so, and that is the legal plugin. So you can see it here. It's already pre-made for you. You can go in here and click on manage. And these are the types of things that it will do: It'll automate contract review, NDA triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings, templated responses. Again, all configurable to your organization's specific business and risk tolerances. And here are the target personas that are already part of this plug-in: So, a commercial council, so contract negotiation, vendor management, etc. A product council: So, product reviews, terms of service, privacy policies, privacy and compliance, litigation support. It's pretty comprehensive, as you can see. Kind of scary that they put all this together here. And again, this does not remove the need for qualified legal professionals. And this is the plugin right here that caused the market crash.
Okay, for the last use case and plugin that I want to share with you, it's the product management plugin. And I think this is really, really cool. So here's an overview of what the PM plugin will do. It covers the full product management workflow. So writing feature specs, managing roadmaps, communicating with stakeholders, synthesizing user research, analyzing competitors, tracking product metrics. It gives you an entire AI-powered product management partner in your business. Again, not only to riff off of essentially, but it will do these tasks for you.
All right, so there you have it. Anthropic's plugins, as you can see, super powerful, plug-and-play. You can customize them. You can create your own plugins. Creating virtual employees for your business, frankly, has never been easier, which is really, really interesting and an interesting glimpse into where things are going in terms of AI and also what Anthropic is focusing on for us businesses. Again, if you are an online business owner and you're looking to leverage AI in your business so that you can streamline your business, you can create more time in your business so that you are able to focus on the higher-level tasks and amplify your message, then we invite you to join us inside the AI Playbook, which is my community for online entrepreneurs looking to leverage AI. I'll link to it in the description below. Thanks so much for watching as always. Appreciate it and I'll see you in the next.