I'm Diving Into Claude Cowork
Recently I was excited when I heard about a new Anthropic product that was being released. You've all heard about it by now. Claude Cowork.
Anyone remember Clippy? The Microsoft Office assistant from back in the day? When AI tools first started popping up, I thought of Clippy. And he has been living rent free in my head ever since.
I have never been the techiest guy or an early adopter of much of anything. Doing the minimum to get by technologically would sufficiently describe my enthusiasm for gadgets, and my brain is allergic to code. It's debatably hampered my career at times, but my old-school analog habits have won the day others. I am a big believer in simplicity in business administration.
I've struggled at times as a CPA with behavior patterns that are often described as ADHD. I've always felt it was greatly exacerbated by technology. Remember those recurring childhood nightmares, the ones that recur repeatedly and manage to be especially terrifying and new each time? One of mine was preparing for a spur of the moment trip (think some trip or opportunity of a lifetime), but when it presents to you, you just can't get it together. The world proceeds in slow motion, but you are frozen, paralyzed by the inability to turn thought into action. My dream has many forms, but I call it "the reaching" dream, otherwise known as crushing anxiety.
Not to get dark, but that feeling was a bit of a preview of the first half of my career as a CPA. Logins here, emails over there, invoices in this browser tab, vendor logins in this one, that other vendor with the janky broken payment system on another, oh wait, time for an excel crash, and then all the other things a normal day brings.
It's perpetual multitasking and massive digital distraction. Technically, I like accounting and I love the art and science of business. It's the janky technology I can't stand. The nightmare we accountants live every day is all the tool fragmentation and constant context switching, upgrading, implementing, adopting, adjusting, and general pace of keeping a business running and fires extinguished.
The thing is, ever since AI chatbots came on the scene, I have been bumping up my tech adoption schedule. You see, from the beginning, I felt like the technological reaching nightmare was finally going to come to an end. I saw a world where AI would finally make everything fully customizable. Software developers should be terrified. The tech resistant are coming for revenge for the past three decades of torture.
For 30 years, office workers conformed to the machine. Now we conform the machine to our work. We are taking back the office.
Back to Clippy. Yeah, he sucked. Absolutely useless. Not for long though, AI is about to give Clippy some massive agency.
The thing about Clippy is that I saw his potential. I believed in you, Clippy! That crushing anxiety that something was just out of reach, miserably, torturously so, it was that I knew a world existed where technology wasn't a massive, distracting pain in the ass. I felt Clippy could be that gateway, if only he could actually function. My hope for Claude is that it is Clippy, perfected.
ChatGPT, RIP, you were a good friend. Odd choice of words? It almost felt that way at times. Useful? I figured out a few tricks. Email editing, for sure. Good at organizing my work, talking me off the occasional ledges, and helping me reach those just outside the box thoughts? Maybe, just maybe. But so completely and utterly flawed at the same time. Oh how I could rage at the workflow. That feeling, that the technology is almost there, but still just out of reach. Oh ChatGPT, you did yourself in by your inability to actually accomplish tasks.
The ChatGPT workflow has always been painful to me. Maybe it’s built for coders brains, not ADHD accountants.
Clippy was just there. Sit down on your plush velvet chair, take in the screeching whine of the CRT monitor, open up Excel, and there he is, your ready, eager assistant. Except he didn't actually do anything useful. You see Mr. Clippy, I have this table over there, and I this table here, and I need you to cross reference the two and sum the lookup column. No, I already searched the help menu, I just can’t make this formula work.
By the way, I am quite accountant-capable and almost FP&A-capable in Excel, but there's always some problem just out of reach, someone a little more capable, that one spreadsheet that could be so much better if I just linked this one calculation or auto pulled this one table. There we go again, reaching. But I knew it was out there.
It's here. I spent 30 minutes with my new friend Claude today, and guess what folks, it's on. Mr. Clippy has grown up. I am so excited about this product because it feels like an opportunity to break that cycle and bring tech back to the simplicity of the blog and forum era. I have great plans for it, but that's about all I care to share. This is more a celebration of potential. Good times.
Now would be a good time to talk about my professional skepticism as it relates to AI. We'll go there next week. Don't worry, I have a hard rule, no client data touches AI until it is thoroughly tested. Only playing in the sandbox now. Off to read more about security. Never been more excited for tech.
Joe Minich, CPA
Founder of Ridgeline Business Solutions. Joe works as an embedded financial operator for owner-led businesses navigating growth, transition, and operational chaos.
