The impact of Anthropic's Claude Cowork, which debuted on January 12 this year, was substantial. Claude Cowork is an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that executes tasks when users issue commands in everyday language. Its launch was a watershed moment that shifted the AI market from a chatbot-centered landscape to one focused on action-taking agents.
The decisive moment that sent shockwaves around the world came on January 30, when Anthropic unveiled 11 self-built open-source plugin tools that can be linked to Claude Cowork. The 11 tools covered a wide range of white-collar functions, including finance, legal, marketing, data analysis, and sales management.
Plugins are tools Anthropic built in-house to allow agents to perform specific business tasks without complex coding. Ordinary users can now run agents through software templates that Anthropic has prepared. Whereas users previously had to enter detailed commands, installing a plugin lets Claude automatically determine the optimal way to handle tasks. With this, legal, finance, and marketing personnel at companies can now have Claude Cowork handle specialized work for just tens of thousands of won per month, without paying for outside services or subscription-based professional software.
Anthropic's release of Claude Cowork plugins triggered massive ripples in the stock market. Shares plunged for Thomson Reuters, LegalZoom, and CS Disco in legal services; Intuit and BlackLine in finance and accounting; Salesforce in sales and customer management; and Snowflake and Datadog in data analytics. That is because professional software for legal, financial, and other specialized fields is no longer the exclusive domain of certain companies. Claude Cowork, together with Claude Code—an agent that allows non-experts to easily code—was the leading factor behind Anthropic's enterprise valuation (965 billion dollars, or about 1,483 trillion won) surpassing OpenAI's (852 billion dollars).
Stunned by Claude Cowork's emergence, OpenAI overhauled its strategy. Until last year, OpenAI had dominated the personal AI model market with ChatGPT and held a substantial lead over Anthropic, which had focused on enterprise customers. But once Claude Cowork succeeded in capturing white-collar demand and the tide turned, OpenAI countered by releasing Codex, a coding agent. The company began aggressively targeting enterprise customers in earnest.
Although a step behind, OpenAI is also reaping the benefits of Codex. On the 2nd (local time), OpenAI released a report titled "The Next Era of Knowledge Work." The core message of the report is that Codex is drawing significant attention not only from professional developers but also from white-collar workers. The intent is to emphasize that Codex is being used in everyday work by office workers across various job functions. In the report, OpenAI stressed that "Codex is increasingly being used to automate routine tasks, increase speed, and remove the bottlenecks of modern knowledge work."
According to OpenAI, Codex's weekly active users have surpassed 5 million, more than a sixfold increase since the app's launch in February. While developers are the main users, knowledge workers account for about 20% of total users, and their growth rate is more than three times faster than that of developers. OpenAI explained that white-collar workers are using Codex to simultaneously draft reports, presentations, and contracts, as well as to automate workflows.
Encouraged by white-collar adoption of Codex, OpenAI unveiled six Codex plugins on the 2nd to chase Anthropic, covering data analysis, creative production, sales, product design, equity investment, and investment banking. The plugins make it possible to integrate Codex into existing workflows and run agents without coding knowledge. The model is aimed at office workers employed at banks and brokerages, or those handling sales, design, and marketing at companies.
Having seen the Codex effect firsthand, OpenAI announced a few weeks later that it would integrate Codex into ChatGPT. Users will be able to access Codex's main features alongside ChatGPT on the web or in applications. As Anthropic's Claude Cowork and Claude Code spread rapidly among companies and office workers, OpenAI declared that rather than operating ChatGPT and Codex separately, it would merge them into a single app.
Snowflake, a cloud data analytics firm, is also riding this wave by upgrading its own AI model. At "Snowflake Summit 26," held in San Francisco starting on the 1st, Snowflake announced that it had renamed its existing Snowflake Intelligence (a personal agent) to "Snowflake Cowork." Snowflake also changed the name of Snowflake Cortex Code, its developer coding tool, to "Snowflake Coco." Internally, Cortex Code had long been shortened to Coco, the company said.
The name Snowflake Cowork bears a notable resemblance to Anthropic's Claude Cowork. The renaming emphasizes the meaning of an assistant that works alongside the user (Cowork). With demand for Snowflake Intelligence having doubled from the previous quarter, analysts say the move is a strategic step to strengthen the push for white-collar customers. Snowflake said, "Cowork aligns with the new category of AI work agents and allows us to more clearly establish our position with customers and in the market," adding, "The new name emphasizes that this is a personal agent that works smarter."
