Meet Cowork (vs Chat, Install, Governance)

Tour stops

01

Chat vs Cowork in 60 seconds

Chat answers a question. Cowork runs a workflow. The Claude.ai web chat is great for one-shot questions and quick drafts. Cowork lives on your laptop, reads from the apps you actually use, and turns multi-step work into something you can re-run by name. Same model, different surface, different reach.

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Open Claude.ai in one tab and Cowork in another. Ask both the same question about a portfolio company. Notice what Cowork pulls in that the web chat does not.

02

Install and sign in (Protis-approved)

Cowork installs from a Protis-vetted download. You sign in with your GGP Claude Enterprise account, which inherits the firm's data-handling policy. Install takes about 15 minutes including the first run; the only friction you should hit is granting terminal access on macOS.

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If you have not installed yet, run the installer now and sign in. Confirm the icon shows up in your menu bar and the Cowork window opens. If you are already installed, type "hello" in a new conversation and confirm Claude responds with your name.

03

Your first /command

Skills are workflows you have named so you can re-run them. Inside Cowork they appear as /commands. Type a slash, pick a skill, fill in the blanks. Naming the workflow is what turns one good output into a repeatable capability your team can share.

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Type "/" in Cowork. Pick /research from the dropdown. Run it on a competitor of any portfolio company. Watch Cowork stage the work in steps before it answers.

04

Three questions before you press run

The Governance one-pager reduces firm-wide AI policy to three questions you ask yourself before submitting any task. One: is anything in this MNPI? Two: am I asking Cowork to take an action I would not let a junior analyst take unsupervised? Three: do I have the source data Claude needs, or am I hoping it can guess?

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Pick the next task you plan to push through Cowork. Run the three questions on it out loud. If question one comes back yes, the task does not go through Cowork at all.

05

What stays off Cowork (MNPI preview)

Anything material and non-public stays off Cowork. Draft board materials before a public filing. Specifics of an unannounced deal. Pre-release financials. The M3 session covers the full MNPI rules; for now, the heuristic is simple: if it would move a public price, it does not go in.

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Take 30 seconds. Name one piece of information you handled this week that should NOT go through Cowork. Keep that mental flag up for the rest of M4.

06

What the rest of M4 builds on this

With Cowork installed and the three governance questions in hand, the next 45 minutes opens up the Power Stack: skills, agents, plugins, MCP connectors, scheduled tasks, and the CLAUDE.md file that teaches Cowork your firm's rules once and forever. Each gets a 60-second exercise so you touch all six before lunch.

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Keep Cowork open on your laptop. The Power Stack Tour topic is the next page; every one of its six stops will land on this same Cowork install.