Your AI, Your Rules — Setting Up Claude Cowork for Your Business

You've Spent Hours Training Your AI. Then You Open a New Chat.

You know the feeling. You've decided to make the move from ChatGPT to Claude. Maybe it was the functionality, maybe it was the hype cycle, maybe it was just time for a change. You've done the work. You've transferred everything across. You open a new chat, full of expectation.

And Claude greets you like a complete stranger.

Suddenly you're explaining your own business — your name, what you do, who you help — like you're introducing yourself to a five-year-old. Everything you'd built up, all that context, all that training? Gone. And you're sitting there thinking: why did I bother?

Here's what nobody tells you when you make the switch: Claude doesn't work the way you think it does. Not out of the box. The memory isn't automatic. The context doesn't carry. Every new chat is a blank slate unless you've deliberately built the architecture to prevent that.

And that word — architecture — is exactly the right one. Because what separates people who get genuine, compounding value from Claude versus people who feel like they're constantly starting over isn't the AI itself. It's whether you've built a system around it.

"That system starts with Claude Cowork. Once you understand what it actually does — not just as a chat tool, but as a strategic thinking partner — you'll stop skimming the surface of what AI can do for your business."

The Problem: You're Not Getting What You Came For

Most small business owners who are using AI right now are using it the same way. They open a chat, type something like "write me a Facebook post about this," get something back that sounds nothing like them, tweak it for ten minutes, give up, and wonder what all the fuss is about.

It feels overwhelming because it is overwhelming. There's a lot of noise, a lot of pressure, a lot of people telling you that you need to be across it or you'll be left behind. And in the middle of all of that, you're just trying to run your business.

So when ChatGPT starts to feel like it actually knows you, and it does build up that context over time, you can jump in for five minutes and get what you need without feeding it your entire life story first. It becomes genuinely useful. A tool you rely on.

And then someone tells you Claude is better. More capable. Deeper. So you make the move.

You transfer everything across, full of expectation, ready to go. And ten chats in, it still feels like you're starting from scratch. Like it has no memory of your business, your tone, your clients, anything. Because unless you've deliberately told it to remember, and built the structure around it to make that stick, you are starting from scratch. Every single time.

That's not a flaw in Claude so much as it is a difference in how it's built. Claude has a deeper capacity and a wider capability than most people realise. It can do things ChatGPT simply cannot. But it doesn't hand you that capability automatically. It asks you to build the architecture first. And if nobody has shown you how to do that, the whole thing just feels like a very expensive fresh start.

That's exactly what Cowork is designed to solve.

The Core Idea: A System That Works For You

Think of Claude Cowork as a highly technical executive assistant in its very early days. Not just something you chat to, but something you can send off to do things. Reply to emails. Organise your filing. Draft technical content. Build spreadsheets. Reconcile information. The potential is genuinely wide, and it's growing. But like any new assistant, it needs onboarding. It needs to understand how you work, what you sound like, and what matters to your business before it can do any of that well.

That onboarding process is what most people skip. And it's why so many people open Cowork, feel slightly lost, and quietly close it again.

Here's what's actually in there. When you navigate into Cowork you'll find a section for skills, and inside it you'll see tiles — pre-built skill packs developed by Anthropic. Marketing. Content. Research. They're fairly self-explanatory when you open them up and have a look around. The technical backend runs deep but you don't need to understand all of it. What you need to understand is the concept: these skills are your starting framework. They're good. They're genuinely useful. And they become exceptional when you make them yours.

The process is simpler than it sounds. Open the marketing skill pack and start talking to it. Ask it to interview you. Feed it existing content you've written. Let it ask you questions and give it time to get a feel for how you communicate. When it feels like it's getting you, ask it to play back what it's learned. Ask it to save that as your brand voice. Then ask it to duplicate the skill and create a bespoke version that carries your brand voice through everything it does from that point forward.

What you're creating isn't just a customised tool. You're building a system that compounds. Every skill you make bespoke, every piece of context you feed in, every iteration you make adds another layer. And over time that system stops feeling like a fresh start every time you open it, and starts feeling like something that genuinely knows your business and works inside it.

That's the shift. From AI that answers questions to AI that does the work.

Getting Set Up: Your First Steps in Cowork

Before you touch a single skill pack, do this first: connect your tools.

Inside Cowork you'll find a connectors section, and it's worth spending a few minutes in there before you do anything else. Cowork can connect directly with a lot of the tools you're probably already using — Google Drive, Canva, Wix, Microsoft 365. If a tool you use has an API and shows up in that list, connect it. You don't need to be technical to do this, and what you're doing is giving Cowork somewhere to actually put things. An AI assistant without anywhere to work is just a chat window. Connecting your tools turns it into something with reach.

The second thing to do is give it its own folder. Think of this as its sandbox — a contained space where it can create and save things without having access to everything on your computer or in your drive. Open a new folder on your Mac or PC, call it something like Playground or Cowork Sandbox, and point Cowork to that. This keeps things contained while you're learning.

Once your connectors are set and your folder is ready, head into the skills section and open the marketing pack. Here's a simple sequence to follow:

1. Start a conversation Introduce yourself and your business as if you're meeting someone new.

2. Ask it to interview you Let it ask the questions — your answers will be more natural than anything you'd write cold.

3. Feed it examples Paste in a blog post, a caption, your about page — anything written in your voice.

4. Ask for a playback Get it to summarise what it's learned about you before you go any further.

5. Save your brand voice Instruct it in plain language: "Please save this as my brand voice."

6. Duplicate and customise Ask it to create a bespoke version of the marketing skill that draws on your brand voice every time it's activated.

7. Test it Give it a simple content task and see if the output actually sounds like you. If it doesn't, go back and feed it more examples.

WORTH KNOWING

Claude reads your entire chat history every single time it responds, even if your message is one word. So the longer a chat runs, the more tokens it consumes. If a conversation starts to feel like it's dragging, get Cowork to write you a handoff document summarising everything you've covered, then open a fresh chat and paste it in. It saves you hitting your limits mid-session.

What It Looks Like When It's Working

The best way I can show you what's possible is to tell you what I've built for my own business. Because I'm not teaching this from a textbook. I'm teaching it from my own Cowork environment, which I'm still building out, and which has already changed how I work in ways I genuinely didn't expect.

A big part of my work outside of IntraWork is long form thought leadership. Essays and articles that sit closer to academic writing — deep analysis, new concepts — the kind of thing that runs to 10,000 words and takes serious intellectual energy to produce. I publish this work on Substack and on my Jessica O'Donnell website. And for a long time, repurposing that content felt like starting an entirely new project. Because the voice I write in for that work is very different to the voice I use here at IntraWork, where everything is practical, implementation focused, and built for people who want to take action.

So I built a skill that bridges them. Using the marketing skill pack as the foundation, I developed two distinct brand voices inside Cowork — one for my academic and intellectual authority register, one for IntraWork's practical voice. Then I created a bespoke skill that sits across both, and its entire job is content repurposing.

Here is what it does now, from a single instruction:

• Takes a long form article and produces a shorter IntraWork blog post, translated from thought leadership into practical implementation

• Writes LinkedIn posts for both my personal page and the IntraWork page, each calibrated to the right voice and lens

• Automatically uploads the IntraWork blog to my Wix website, writes the metadata, assigns categories and tags, selects a feature image from a pre-loaded folder, and publishes it in the correct format

• Saves the LinkedIn posts to a Word document, pushes that to SharePoint, generates a download link, and drops that link into my dashboard so everything is waiting for me when I open it

I still have one more layer to build — the Canva integration, so that image tiles for each LinkedIn post are created automatically as part of the same workflow. But even without that final piece, what used to take me the better part of a day now happens in one sweep.

That is what a bespoke skill built on your brand voice actually looks like in practice. Not a chat that helps you write things. A system that does the work, in your voice, and puts it exactly where it needs to go.

The Compounding Effect

Here is what I want you to take away from all of this.

The more you build, the more you trust. And the more you trust, the more you hand off. And the more you hand off, the more capacity you have to do the work that actually matters to you. That's the compounding effect of a system like this, and it doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen.

Most of us went into business for ourselves because we wanted impact. We wanted reach. We wanted to help people in a way that a nine to five never quite allowed. And then the reality of running a small business set in, and a significant portion of every single day started going to the tasks that have nothing to do with why we started. The admin. The content. The filing. The things that are necessary but unmotivating, that take twice as long as they should because they're not our zone of genius, and that quietly accumulate into a kind of overwhelm that sits at the end of every workday like an uninvited guest.

Cowork doesn't replace what you do. It never will. But it can take a meaningful portion of that weight off your plate, at a fraction of what it would cost to hire someone to do it for you, and with a level of consistency that a human assistant working across multiple clients simply cannot maintain.

The key is building the skills to hand things off well. That takes a little time upfront. It takes some patience while you're learning, and some trust that the system will get there even when the early results aren't perfect. But every skill you build, every brand voice you refine, every workflow you add is another layer in a system that keeps working even when you're not.

"You started your business to do more of what you love. This is how you get there."

Ready to Build Your System?

I'm offering a small number of one on one and small group sessions for people who want to get their Claude Cowork actually set up — properly, and bespoke to their business. Spaces are limited.

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