Where you can use Claude, and the one place to ignore
A short map of the places you can meet Claude, written for someone who wants to know where to type rather than what the whole product range is called.
There are about six places you can type into Claude. One of them you can ignore for the rest of your career. The everyday ones will carry almost all of your work, one is new enough to deserve a proper look, and knowing where you can use Claude is more useful than knowing what every product in the range is called.
The everyday surfaces
The web app is where most people start, and there are desktop apps for macOS and Windows and phone apps for iPhone and Android. It is the same product in each case, with the same conversations waiting for you wherever you sign in. Voice mode, file uploads, web search and a Google Workspace connection sit across those surfaces.
Two extensions widen the net. Claude for Chrome puts it in the browser next to whatever you happen to be reading. Claude for Microsoft 365 puts it beside the documents and mail your organisation already runs on. Neither changes what Claude can do. They change how far you have to travel to use it, which in practice changes how often you bother. An @Claude tag does the same job from the other direction, pulling it into something you are already working in.
If the model names on the sign-in screen are the thing slowing you down, the tier comparison is a five-minute read. If you would rather skip to the point, the hours tend to reappear in specific places, and knowing which ones beats knowing every app.
Cowork, which deserves your attention
Claude Cowork launched on desktop in January 2026, then reached web and mobile from July 2026. You hand it a task instead of holding a conversation about one, and it sits on the Max subscription tier.
Business process work, meaning things like compiling reports and reconciling spreadsheets, accounts for about a third of what people do with it, and software development for under a tenth. The heaviest users sit in finance, HR, administration, marketing and management, which is not the group that normally gets the new thing first.
TechCrunch described the appeal as being able to "start a task from their desk, get status updates on their phone, and pick up the finished output later", and to do it "even if their laptop is closed." Anthropic's framing is that it handles "tasks that are part of a broad swath of jobs, but are rarely a person's core responsibility", which is a fair description of most of what clogs a senior week.
The one to ignore
Claude Code is a tool for developers, working in the places developers work. If you do not write software, ignore it. Ignore it also when somebody senior suggests that leaders ought to understand it on principle, because you do not need to know how the finance system was built in order to read the management accounts.
The one thing worth knowing is that it exists, so you can recognise the moment an article about Claude has quietly stopped being about you and started being about your engineering team. Specialised versions for design, scientific research and security analysis sit in the same category.
The surface matters less than the habit
What decides whether Claude is worth its licence is whether you open it on a Tuesday morning when nobody is watching, not whether you have the browser extension installed. So open it tomorrow, on something you were going to do anyway, and see whether you come back to it on Wednesday.