Why It Matters
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Enterprises can now start an agentic automation workflow on their desktop and continue with it on their mobile devices.
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It shows that AI agents are now moving to edge devices.
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Anthropic wants to be on every enterprise device.
Anthropic’s rollout of Claude Cowork to mobile and the web reflects how enterprise employees’ work has evolved over the last decade and continues the recent trend of building agentic AI capabilities into edge devices.
The generative AI vendor on July 7 revealed that it will grant beta access to the new mobile and web functions to Claude Max users over the next several weeks. With the update, users can start a task on their desktop and continue either on their phone or on the web. Users can also schedule automated tasks, such as preparing client briefs. However, Anthropic said that if Claude encounters an important decision point, it will send a notification to the user’s phone so the user can approve the progress.
The move to open Claude Cowork, the vendor’s autonomous AI assistant, to the web and mobile reflects the shift in how work is done over the past few years. While many enterprise employees still perform most of their deep work on desktops, they have moved other parts of their work to edge devices. This change is mirrored with AI agents, said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner.
AI and Work
“AI is trying to replicate that,” Chandrasekaran said, noting that an AI agent can start an automation or deep research workflow on the desktop, and later be notified on their mobile device that the work has been completed.
He added that the expansion of Claude Cowork to the web and mobile also indicates a broader range of applications in which AI agents can operate.
“There are agents that are helping us in our digital workplace, which is that they’re helping us automate our day-to-day tasks,” Chandrasekaran said.
In addition, agents are also being used in process automation, he continued.
“These use cases will span a gamut of endpoint devices,” he said. “This is also a signal that Anthropic wants to … follow the users in terms of the devices that they want to use for these sorts of tasks.”
Some Challenges
While Anthropic’s ambition is to be on every device, the vendor faces some barriers. One is that following the user across devices does not mean the user will get the same type of performance on each device.
“They’re going to be very dependent on low-bandwidth networks,” Chandrasekaran said. “In some cases, you may require a little bit more processing on the endpoint device.”
Moreover, it is unclear how capable the mobile version of Claude Cowork will be, said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
“I do wonder how much of that user experience gets sacrificed when someone uses it,” Su said. “There are certain limitations as to how you present some of the functions and some of the UX.”
Another hurdle for the AI vendor is security and privacy. While enterprises monitor the data sent to AI agents, it will still be interesting to see whether Anthropic can effectively serve as a data enclave or provide data privacy for enterprises, Chandrasekaran added.
Also, Claude Cowork on mobile could raise concerns about shadow AI for enterprises.
With Anthropic diving into mobile, competitors such as Google might follow suit. This is especially plausible for Google, which offers the Gemini model family, Google Workspace, Android phones and Chromebooks.
“It is very natural, and it is also inevitable that Google will follow on topic into the mobile devices. I am sure OpenAI will do something similar as well,” Chandrasekaran said. “AI getting to the edge is the only way to think about it.”
