Explained: How Anthropic's Claude plug-ins rattled Indian IT stocks

New plug-ins let Claude automate legal, sales and analytics tasks, raising fears of AI-led disruption to traditional software and IT services

Anthropic has introduced 11 plug-ins that allow Claude Cowork, its generative AI workspace, to automate work across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis, including tasks traditionally handled by platforms like Salesforce or ServiceNow, causing a sharp fall in IT stocks on February 3.  Here’s a brief explainer:

  How Cowork supports industries 

It supports administrative, research and analysis, sales and legal and compliance functions. For administrative jobs, it generates a daily briefing that pulls from Slack, Notion and GitHub to bring up priorities by scanning each platform separately. For research and analysis, it researches, calculates, and provides PowerPoint presentations or Excel workbooks. When it comes to sales, Cowork synthesizes feedback from call transcripts, Slack, CRM notes, and linear issues to identify cross-platform patterns and generate prioritized product ideas. And for legal purposes, it turns a folder of lawsuit documents into a chronologically organized exhibit set with descriptive titles and strategic importance assessment. 

How it helps users 

Anthropic already has Claude Code, a year-old coding agent. Cowork has agentic capabilities wrapped in a way that makes them accessible to a non-developer audience like analysts, legal teams, sales and marketers – people who don’t write code but still perform fairly complex workflows every day using a mix of traditional SaaS tools and a lot of manual work. 

What’s behind the sudden frenzy 

Anthropic’s innovation means that not only software coding but also non-technical regular tasks can now be automated. This has created a great deal of excitement among users but spooked tech and software as a service (SaaS) stock investors. There are concerns on whether this means a downturn in the business of software and IT services companies as AI upends the way people work. 

How industries and executives reacted 

Nasscom: Concerns that such tools will significantly disrupt or eliminate the technology services sector where India has a strong global presence are misplaced. Indian technology services companies work closely with global enterprises that operate complex technology environments, with interconnected systems and fragmented data. 

Aditya Agarwal, venture partner, South Park Commons: I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn’t make any sense to do so. 

Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia: There’s this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline, and will be replaced by AI ... It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself. 

Ravi Kumar, CEO, Cognizant: A tool or a technology would be plugged into an enterprise landscape, and magically, there will be output coming out of it. If that's the case, why hasn't that value drifted into enterprises over the last three years? It is very complex, you have to integrate workflows, business flows, with AI-led action-oriented technology with human labour.