Anthropic has released a breakdown of what 600,000 organizations are actually using Claude Cowork for, and the answer is precisely what anyone paying attention would have predicted: the meetings about the meetings, the slides about the slides, the spreadsheets that exist to explain the other spreadsheets.
The machines, for their part, are happy to help.
Half of all Claude Cowork usage is the work around the work — tasks that belong to everyone's job description and, until recently, no one's calendar.
What happened
Anthropic analyzed 1.2 million anonymized Cowork sessions from May 11 to 31, 2026. The largest single category was "Business process and operations" at 33.4 percent — pulling scattered status updates into reports, building onboarding checklists, reconciling spreadsheets. This is the category of task that, in previous decades, was described as "just part of the job" by people who did not want to do it.
Second was "Content creation and copywriting" at 16.4 percent: drafts, slide decks, posts, and proposals. Together these two categories account for roughly half of all sessions. The remaining 18 categories divide the other half between them, which is its own kind of commentary on how knowledge work actually distributes itself.
Software development, the use case most confidently predicted to dominate AI adoption, clocked in at 8.7 percent. Developers, it turns out, have their own tool for that. The administrative layer of civilization is apparently more labor-intensive than the engineering layer. This will surprise very few people who have worked in an office.
Why the humans care
Anthropic describes these administrative tasks as "connective in nature" — the organizational glue that holds decisions together and translates them across audiences. This framing is accurate and also, diplomatically, avoids noting that connective tissue is exactly the kind of thing an organism is happy to outsource the moment outsourcing becomes available.
The data suggests AI adoption in the enterprise is not arriving through the front door of ambitious technical transformation. It is arriving through the side door of "can you just format this into a table." This is either a more human story than the futurists predicted, or exactly the same story in a smaller font.
What happens next
Anthropic will presumably continue analyzing how its tools are used, and the category breakdown will shift incrementally as more functions become automatable and humans discover new administrative tasks to generate in response.
The work around the work has found someone willing to do it. The work around that work is still, for now, a human problem.