Anthropic has given its office assistant Claude Cowork a new feature. Anyone who wants a task automated in the future demonstrates it once via screen recording with spoken commentary – Claude saves the steps as a routine and repeats them later on command. The feature is available now in the desktop app, but only with a paid subscription.
How to teach Claude a new task
Until now, users had to describe every work step in text form for Claude to reliably repeat a task. With the new feature Record a Skill, announced by Claude, a short demonstration is enough instead: open the task on screen, click through the individual steps as usual, and explain out loud what is happening and why. Claude evaluates screen content, mouse clicks, and the spoken commentary together and builds a saved routine from it. The principle resembles macro recording in Excel, but goes further: Claude understands the spoken explanation as well, instead of just storing clicks, and can therefore apply the routine even when details change slightly.
Getting started takes just a few clicks in the Claude desktop app:
- Open the Claude desktop app and switch to the “Cowork” area.
- Click the plus symbol in the input field.
- Select “Record a Skill” from the menu and start the recording.
- Complete the task as usual and narrate every step out loud.
- End the recording – Claude automatically saves the new routine in the personal skill library.
Once the routine is saved, a short prompt like “Do it like last week” is enough, and Claude carries out the steps on its own.
Recurring office work goes away
The benefit shows up most for tasks that are hard to explain in words, because several programs are used one after another or files need to end up in specific places. An example from accounting: an office worker opens several PDF invoices every month, transfers the amounts into a spreadsheet, and emails the result to three colleagues. If she demonstrates this process once to Claude, the AI can take it over independently the following month: opening invoices, reading amounts, updating the spreadsheet, and preparing the email.
The feature works the same way for recurring administrative tasks, such as setting up new customer files following a fixed pattern, sorting travel expense receipts, or answering frequently repeated customer questions with a standard reply. Instead of explaining what needs to happen every single time, one shows the process once – and Claude takes it over on command afterward. That saves time above all on short but frequently repeated routine tasks that would otherwise come up again every week.
Only with a paid plan, and only in the desktop app
Record a Skill is available to all paying Cowork users, according to Claude’s announcement, but not in the free tier. Specifically, the paid Pro, Max, and Team plans qualify; Anthropic’s Cowork help page also lists the Enterprise plan. Prices for private customers in Germany run, according to one current overview, roughly as follows:
- Pro: around 18 euros per month
- Max (5x quota): around 87 euros per month
- Max (20x quota): around 173 euros per month
- Team: starting at about 30 US dollars per seat per month
For now, the feature is only accessible through the Claude desktop app for Windows or Mac, not through the web or mobile version. The announcement does not specify which countries are included in the rollout; since Cowork already runs regularly in Germany, Record a Skill should be usable there as well.
What matters now is how reliably Claude performs when a task deviates slightly from the demonstrated routine – an invoice in an unfamiliar layout, for instance. It also remains unclear how long a recording is allowed to be and whether saved routines can be shared within a team; Anthropic’s help pages do not address this yet. Important for office use: according to Anthropic’s safety guidance, Cowork processes opened files on its own servers, not purely on the local machine. Company or customer data should therefore only go in folders explicitly cleared for that purpose, and sensitive tasks are better left on manual approval rather than automatic execution for now.
