Every small-business owner knows the feeling. It is the week before the accountant needs everything, and the year’s record-keeping is a drawer of crumpled receipts, a camera roll full of bank screenshots, and a spreadsheet someone started in February and abandoned by March. The owner of a Montego Bay café gives up a Sunday typing receipts into Excel one line at a time. A Spanish Town hardware store pays a junior to do the same. The work is not hard. It is just long, dull, and easy to get wrong when you are tired.

This is exactly the kind of task artificial intelligence was built for — not the glamorous, strategic work, but the patient, repetitive tidying that stands between a business and a clean set of books. Over the past few articles this column has used AI chatbots one file at a time. This week we try something a step further: Claude’s new desktop app, working in a feature called Cowork, which does not wait for you to upload files one by one. You point it at a folder on your own computer and it works across everything inside at once.

Why “point it at a folder” changes the job