How to customize plugins in Cowork
Customize Anthropic's pre-built plugins with your team's tools, processes, and expertise so every command runs from your context.
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- ProductCowork
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In Cowork, plugins give Claude domain expertise for your role — sales methodology, financial frameworks, legal review playbooks, marketing campaign structures. Each plugin combines skills, commands, connectors, and sub-agents into a package you can customize for your team.
Anthropic's prebuilt plugins help give you structure and a starting point. Without customization, Claude asks setup questions before using plugins to understand your needs. Customization bakes those answers in, so every command starts from your context instead of asking from scratch.
Cowork allows customization to happen through conversation. Claude asks about your work and updates the plugin to match.
To learn more about installing and using plugins in Cowork, visit here.
What you can customize in plugins
In plugin settings, click Customize on any installed plugin. Claude opens a conversation in Cowork and walks you through tailoring the plugin to your needs.
Your tools.
Plugins describe tool connections with general labels — "CRM," "design tool," "analytics platform" — rather than specific product names. Customization maps these to your actual tools so the plugin knows where to pull data and write results.
If Claude references a tool you haven't connected yet, it surfaces the connector inline for you to authenticate. If no connector exists for a platform you use, Claude adjusts the workflow to prompt you for that data manually instead. You can browse and manage connectors directly in settings.
Your processes.
Commands are structured workflows that appear when you type / in chat. Each one walks through a process and produces a deliverable. Until you provide information about your workflow, Claude asks for context each time you run a command. After customization, Claude already knows your tools, your data sources, and your frameworks.
If a workflow involves distinct phases that could run in parallel — gathering from multiple sources, processing large documents — mentioning that during customization lets Claude configure sub-agents to split the work.
Your expertise.
Some context isn't tied to a single command and instead applies across the plugin. Think of information like your brand voice, your review standards, or your outreach conventions. Plugins store this knowledge as skills, which provide background expertise that Claude draws from based on what you're working on.
Sharing existing documents and examples of your work during customization — brand guides, playbooks, past deliverables – gives Claude concrete material to work from. Claude pulls what's relevant into the plugin so you're building from what your past work looks and sounds like.
Customization by role
Plugins get more useful as they become more specific to your team. What's worth customizing depends on what you do.
Sales
Share your deal stages, your qualification framework (MEDDIC, SPIN, Challenger, or your own), and your competitive positioning. Point Claude to your CRM for account context.
The result: /call-prep produces briefs using your deal framework. /forecast weights your pipeline by your stage probabilities.
Tips:
- If past proposals or outreach that landed well live in a shared drive or CRM, point Claude there. New drafts pick up the structure and emphasis of what worked.
- Customized commands can run on a schedule:
/pipeline-reviewevery Monday,/forecasteach Friday, your criteria applied each time.
Finance
Share your chart of accounts, materiality thresholds, and close process. Point Claude to your data warehouse for financial data.
The result: /variance-analysis decomposes variances by the drivers you specify and flags what exceeds your thresholds. /reconciliation produces workpapers in your format.
Tips:
- Point Claude to your workpaper templates or memo formats. Output matches the structure your team already produces.
- If last quarter's close package or variance memo lives in a connected drive, tell Claude to reference it. Output stays consistent period over period, and Claude flags what changed.
Legal
Share your standard positions on each clause type: what's acceptable, what needs negotiation, what gets escalated.
The result: /review-contract flags clauses against your positions with your severity classifications. /triage-nda screens against your defaults for term, jurisdiction, and carveouts.
Tips:
- If your team maintains approved clause language (indemnification provisions, fallback positions), share it or point Claude to where it lives. Claude suggests replacements from your library when it flags deviations.
- Past redlines teach Claude your negotiation style — how direct, how aggressive the fallbacks, how rationale is framed — and it applies that to new suggestions.
Marketing
Share your audience segments, channel mix, success metrics, and style guide.
The result: /campaign-plan builds briefs targeting your audiences through your channels. /draft-content produces copy in your voice for your content types.
Tips:
- Claude reads visual references — brand guideline PDFs, PPTX templates, screenshots of your website — and picks up colors, typography, and layout. Output reflects them.
- Copy you've been happy with (emails, posts, campaign briefs) can teach Claude tone and structure quicker and more precisely than descriptions of your voice.
Improving your plugins over time
You don't have to cover everything at once. Ask Claude to review the plugin anytime. It can tell you what you missed and what's left to improve.
If while using a plugin, you find the output doesn't quite match your expectations, tell Claude to fix it directly in the conversation. Review the changes and save to update the plugin.
In settings, you can see everything inside a plugin — commands, skills, connectors, and subagents listed individually. You can open any skill or command file to edit directly, or continue customizing with Claude.
Things to note
- Plugins work in Cowork, not Chat. If you're deciding when to use which, the Desktop tutorial walks through the difference.
- Customizations live on your machine. They don't sync across devices or to teammates automatically. You can share them as a compressed file, host them on GitHub for automatic updates, or have an admin provision them across your org.
- Skills and connectors aren't limited to plugins. You can add standalone skills and connectors that aren't tied to any plugin, giving you personal context that applies across everything you do in Cowork. In settings, you can view plugin components, standalone skills, and connectors in one place.
Cowork with plugins is available as a research preview for all paid Claude plans (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise) on macOS and Windows. Browse pre-built plugins.