GoKawiilElyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
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ZDNET's key takeaways
Claude Cowork turned messy tasks into useful results.
It helped fix servers, sort PDFs, and review contracts.
Giving an AI that much access remains unsettling.
I am not a naturally trusting person. So when Claude Cowork was launched, the idea of giving an AI access to my Google Docs and Gmail did not sit well with me.
Heck, back in the day, the idea of letting Google manage my email didn't sit well with me, either. I was once a big proponent of only using servers you could touch, restart, and disassemble at 3 a.m. The idea of letting Google, the self-acknowledged master of information vacuuming, have access to my email seemed ludicrous.
Heck, even letting a cloud hosting provider host my web server seemed extreme. There was a time in the early days of the web when my startup's $2,000-a-month T-1 line entered my apartment in my bedroom, ran through my bathroom, then through my bedroom closet, across the hall, and into a linen closet with an octet of tower servers and an ambient temperature in the mid-90s.
Try explaining that to your apartment manager. And no, it wasn't a grow room, which I had to prove to multiple authorities over the years. My only saving grace was I could fix their computers for them.
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