Using Claude Cowork and Codex for Automating ANY Business Task

Tools like Codex or Claude Code are pretty good at helping you work with code, right? I mean, it's pretty obvious. It's Codex, it's Claude Code, kind of makes sense. But it's important to understand that you can do more with those tools than just work on code. And for example, in the Codex course I have, which you find linked below if you're interested, I do primarily dive into coding and show you all the nitty-gritty details there and some tips and tricks, how to get the most out of it. But I also have some lectures in there where I show you how to use it for non-coding tasks, because that is useful to know as well, because you may not be a developer, then that is great. But even as a developer, we all got stuff to do that is not directly related to coding, where we might be too lazy to do it manually. So for example, in Codex, you can use it to generate images. You can ask it to create here, in my case, a slight graphic that explains how Tailscale works. Tailscale is an amazing tool for securing your VPS, for example. And I also got a course on securely setting up a VPS and so on if you're interested, but enough of the plugs for now. And you can activate a skill that's built into Codex, the ImageGen skill. You shouldn't need to, it should in theory be able to invoke it itself. But if you know that you want an image, you can actively invoke it by using dollar sign and then ImageGen is the skill name. I got another skill here, which I built myself, which is a bit more versatile and uses the Fal AI API. But if you use this built-in skill, it will go ahead and use the GPT Image 2 model by OpenAI to produce an image. So the AI agent does all of that for you, all in Codex. You don't have to leave the site, you don't have to interact with the OpenAI API or anything like that. So if you want to create an infographic or any kind of image, can be an image of a dog, can be anything, you can do that from inside Codex. And it's still a chat, you can refine the image, you can ask it to add a logo, for example, and guess what? It does that. So that's of course interesting to know because we all got scenarios where we need some image or tweak some image and anything like that. And it doesn't stop there. You can also use Codex to analyze data, for example. It can work with CSV, Excel, PDF documents and many, many other formats. It can read such a file. And you know how it does that? It does that by using code under the hood because code, of course, is not necessarily just the main product as it is for you as a developer when you are writing code to build a software. But it can also be just a tool. Code can be a tool and it is a tool here used by Codex if you ask it to analyze some sales CSV file. It writes some code, some Python code, for example, that opens the file, performs some analytics, creates some summary statistics, and then it outputs those statistics here. And it doesn't show you the code. It, it throws away the code. It may just create it and use it in memory, but it gives you the final results and it doesn't hallucinate them, but instead it really calculates them with help of code. And it can also produce Excel sheets, which you can then also open in the Codex app. And in there, you can then have charts if you ask it to create some charts as I did. It can also work with PDF documents, also create PDF documents. So here I ask it to create an executive summary PDF report based on all this data and insights and it did that. And this is all important stuff to know. And this is all also covered in my Codex course, which as mentioned is primarily about coding though. So coding is the main task. Nonetheless, I feel like it's important to understand that this is where the companies are heading to and that you can do these things with Codex, for example. And of course, Codex is not the only tool. We also have Claude code and I'll hand it over to Manuel to explain to you how things work with the Claude universe. With Claude or Anthropic things are the same, but also a bit different than we saw it with Codex and OpenAI. Whilst OpenAI uses one combined tool, Codex, Claude tries to separate their different users. Everything is also combined in one app. It is the Claude app, which you can download on this page here. Link is in the video description. And in this app, we find three different sections. Chat, which is the normal chat interface we know from chat GPT, Gemini and so on. We have the code section, which is made specifically for coding projects for developers. And we have co-work, which is the non-coding task completion sections or to say the idea behind co-work is that it's not only a chat. It completes tasks for you. It has local file access. It can create files, edit files, delete files. So it can manage entire projects on your machine for you. To understand co-work, I prepared some demo files for you. The first file here is about the working policy, the company policy of a hypothetical company we have right here. This folder contains text files, some internal memos. It contains PDFs, an image, so all information about our company. Now, what I could do now in Claude co-work is I could select this folder. So you always have the option here to work in a project, which we'll do in a few seconds or to simply select a folder. Here, I'll select this demo one folder containing all those files. Now I give Claude access to this folder and therefore to all the files, all the data inside this folder. And now I can just ask it to read all the documents, identify the key themes and then produce a one-page executive summary as a Word document. With this, Claude will now start this process, will now complete this task for me. You can always check the logic it runs behind. So which commands it runs, which code it uses. As Max explained earlier in Codex, Claude also uses code to complete specific tasks, code which is not stored, but just used to complete the tasks and then it's deleted again. Here it reads all our files. Here we find a Docx skill, which was used. This is a built-in skill, which allows Claude to create doc files. And now we have the finished document as requested. We can access the document from our folder on our machine, but also directly here in Claude co-work. As instructed, we have a one-page executive summary about the core work policy in this company here. And this is one of the big advantages of Claude co-work here. It is a very nice and easy to understand user interface. You get clear questions about the permissions, you grant Claude co-work, for example, to interact with files on your machine, and then you can just let it do its work and access the files easily inside the tool. So this year was a so-called single session. So we just gave Claude co-work access to one folder, completed a task, and then we are done. But you can also use Claude co-work for ongoing projects. And as the name indicates, we have a dedicated project section here in Claude co-work, which I'll quickly show you in a second example. A co-work has the advantage of giving Claude co-work more context, more information it can always access and remember. So you can start multiple sessions inside one specific project and always remember the information and the context that you provided and also the previously discussed topics. So if we create such a new project here and use an existing folder, which is our demo two folder, this folder now contains a single sales report only. So here we could now add some instructions, we could add additional files, which we won't do at this stage. But we cannot simply create this project. So here we are now in this project, we are working in this demo two folder. I want to get started by reading the sales report that we have inside our project folder to get a rough idea about the core findings and what's going on in general. So here we get an overview of what went well, what was underperforming and so on. And now I can continue with my next task where I want to build an Excel file based on the findings in this report. Still in the same project, still in the same chat. So now I'll create this Excel file and now we created that Excel file, which we can again directly access here in our interface. We have different tables for different customers, product lines and regions. And now I can go back to my core project folder in here. I can find my previous chat and my previous output that was generated. And now I will start a new session inside this project where I have all the context of the full project in here. And I want to create a PowerPoint presentation now and I want to follow the brand guidelines for the visual style. So far we don't have any brand guidelines. So I can just add another folder as context here, which is this brand template folder. Claude will automatically identify this folder as the important one for the brand guidelines. And now I'll let it finish this task too. And now if we check the commands used so far in here, we can see that it used the brand guidelines doc file. So it identified the branding guidelines that I gave it. And here we have our slides now, which we can again access directly in Claude Co-work. We have some charts, we have some tables in here. The styling is totally based on our branding templates. Of course, you have full control about the style, the colors and the look that you want to have in here. And once again, if you go back to the main project menu, you can find this second task now down here. And also the presentation, which is now created and accessible in our demo to project folder. And these are just the basics of Claude Co-work. Now if you want to dive deeper into Claude Co-work and use it for your non code related tasks, we have a brand new course for you, Claude Co-work the Practical Guide. You can find all information about this course in the video description. It also dives into more advanced Claude Co-work features like this patch where you can control Claude Co-work from your mobile phone or also computer use, which allows Claude Co-work to access your computer to interact with tools on your machine autonomously. This course also dives into the safety concerns that come with using such agents on your machine. So if you're interested, check the course landing page. Otherwise, try Claude Co-work and codex on your own. As you saw, those are way more than coding agents or coding assistants. They can help you in lots of different tasks nowadays.