“Cowork is designed to make using Claude for new work as simple as possible. You don’t need to keep manually providing context or converting Claude’s outputs into the right format. Nor do you have to wait for Claude to finish before offering further ideas or feedback: you can queue up tasks and let Claude work through them in parallel,” Anthropic said.

“It feels much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leaving messages for a coworker.”

These plugins allow for Claude Cowork to be used in finance, marketing, data analysis and legal, threatening traditional billable-hour models and reducing faith in software-as-a-service (SaaS), leading to the selloff.

Lian Jye Su, technology analyst at Omdia, told Information Age that Claude Cowork’s ability to work autonomously and understand natural language made it “a lot more advanced than traditional SaaS solutions that are business process-oriented”.

“Claude Cowork is also seen to be the perfect alternative to build custom tools that can break down data silos and automate complex workflows,” Su said.

“Investors see Cowork as a direct threat to incumbents like Salesforce, Workday, or ServiceNow, whose models rely on ongoing human interaction with their platforms.”

The selloffs impacted a number of companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Workday and SAP, all of which have faced concerns regarding the impact that agentic AI has on demand for their software and products.

“AI advancement could trigger existential problems for undifferentiated and overvalued SaaS offerings,” Su said.

“However, high-quality platforms with deep integrations may still benefit from the AI advancement.

“The winners will be those who evolve into AI-native ecosystems, but many legacy players risk irrelevance if they can’t.”

Atlassian has remained positive about AI and believes that the technology is good for the business.

Atlassian CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes told investors that AI is still something to benefit its products and customers, despite having lost 70 per cent of its share price on the Nasdaq over the last 12 months.

“I’m convinced AI is great for Atlassian. Others think software is dead,” he told shareholders.

“There is significant value, I think, between our offerings and those offerings,” he added, in reference to tools like Cowork.

“So we don’t see that as being perhaps the challenge that others do out there.

“There’s a great partnership opportunity there, and we continue to explore that, we continue to use their offerings really strongly internally.”

While he said he was “frustrated” by the share price drop, he maintained that he was “incredibly bullish” about AI.

In July last year, Cannon-Brookes notified staff through a pre-recorded video that jobs were being terminated and that staff would need to wait 15 minutes to receive an email determining their future at the company.

Then, an Atlassian spokesperson said the decision to release 150 staff affected Australian workers.

“We have made this decision after implementing improvements to the customer experience across our platform and tools, resulting in a significant reduction in support needs,” the company said.

“While we’re proud of this momentum, it leaves us with more capacity than needed to deliver strong customer support. [The] changes impact 150 teammates across the US, Australia, India, Germany, Canada, and the UK.”

The company also announced the acquisition of The Browser Company in September, with which it said it wants to develop its own work-oriented AI search browser.