Anthropic released 31 ready-made business skills for Claude Cowork. Most of them will not matter to most people. This video tests the Small Business plugin and focuses on the three skills that can actually change something about a real workweek.
One of the three skills flagged a warning sign in an actual business deal Cal was ready to sign, which is the example the video walks through in detail.
Anthropic just released 31 ready-made business skills for Claude Cowork, and if your first thought was "which ones actually matter," that's the right reaction. Because most of them won't, not for you, not for the kind of work you're already doing.
It took me 20 years of teaching and more side-by-side testing than I'd like to admit to realize that the question was never "which tools are impressive?" It's "which ones change something about how your actual week goes?"
By the end of this video you'll know exactly which three skills are worth your time, how to install the plugin in under 30 seconds, and how each one works in a real situation. One of them recently helped me hit the brakes before signing a deal I would have regretted.
A Claude skill is a pre-built set of instructions for a repeatable task. Instead of writing a detailed prompt from scratch every time, a skill already knows what job it's doing, what to look for, and what kind of output to produce.
To access these business skills: open Cowork, hit Customize, find Plugins, hit the plus, search for Small Business, and install. Once it's in, all 31 skills are available straight away, covering money and finance (cash flow forecasting, invoice chasing, month-end prep, tax prep), sales and marketing (lead scoring, campaign planning, content strategy), customer operations (complaint handling, CRM cleanup, contract review), business intelligence (Monday brief, Friday brief, quarterly review), and hiring and setup (job post builder, onboarding).
It looks like sensory overload, but you won't need most of these. Probably just three of these will do more useful work than the other 28 combined.
You might see it listed as Business Pulse, Monday Brief, or Friday Brief. Before you start work, Claude pulls together the information you'd normally spend 15 minutes gathering yourself: cash position, overdue invoices, upcoming meetings, messages that need a response, priorities for the day. This skill saves you 10 to 15 minutes every morning.
It's contract review. Claude is not a lawyer, and AI doesn't replace legal advice, but the first problem with most complicated documents isn't the final legal decision, it's knowing what you should be paying attention to before you get there.
I was looking at a business agreement I was genuinely interested in moving forward with. On the surface it looked like a reasonable deal and I was ready to sign. But I decided to run it through the contract review skill before I committed to anything. Claude flagged that some of the restriction language was broader than it first appeared, raised concerns about the payment structure, flagged confidentiality language, and pointed out liability language that could create significant exposure for me.
Claude didn't make the decision, but it helped me ask better questions. After reviewing what Claude flagged, I decided not to move forward, not because Claude told me not to, but because it helped me see enough warning signs that the deal no longer made sense for my situation.
Most professionals are already sitting on useful feedback, they just don't have time to organize it: client emails, support tickets, survey responses, reviews, comments, complaints, internal team feedback. Customer Pulse takes that messy, scattered feedback and pulls out the patterns, what people keep asking for, what they're frustrated by, what probably needs your attention first.
Three questions before starting with any of these skills: is this a task you already do regularly? Does it follow a similar pattern each time? And can you review the result before anything important happens, especially with money, contracts, customers, or anything public? Claude prepares the work. You review it. You make the call.
This video points to The Professional AI Interview Kit, the practical next step after watching.