The Productivity plugin is the closest thing Cowork has to a personal operating system. It covers three core areas:

Task Management — The Productivity plugin can help you organize, prioritize, and track tasks. You can ask Cowork to create task lists from meeting notes, break large projects into subtasks, set priorities, and review what is on your plate. Unlike a traditional task manager, Cowork understands context — it can look at a project brief and generate a realistic task breakdown without you specifying every step.

Calendar Awareness — When connected to your calendar through an MCP connector, Cowork can factor your schedule into its recommendations. It knows when you have back-to-back meetings and should not start a deep-work task. It can help you find open slots for focused work or suggest when to schedule a follow-up.

Personal Context — This is where the Productivity plugin gets powerful. Over time, you can build up a set of personal context files — your preferences, your recurring workflows, your team structure, your project priorities. Cowork uses this context to give you more relevant, personalized assistance without you repeating yourself every session.

The beauty of the Productivity plugin is that it adapts to how you work. Two people can install the same plugin and end up with very different workflows, because the underlying skill files are customizable and the personal context layer is unique to each user.

The Research plugin turns Cowork into a thorough research assistant. When you need more than a quick answer — when you need a comprehensive, well-sourced analysis — the Research plugin is your tool.

Here is what makes it different from simply asking Cowork a question:

Structured Research Process — The Research plugin follows a methodical approach: defining the research question, identifying sources, gathering information, synthesizing findings, and presenting results with proper citations. It does not just give you an answer; it shows you where that answer came from.

Citation Tracking — Every claim in a research output is linked back to its source. This is critical for professional work where you need to verify information, share findings with stakeholders, or build on previous research. You get transparency into what Cowork found and where it found it.

Deep Exploration — The Research plugin can spin up sub-agents to explore multiple angles of a topic simultaneously. While one sub-agent investigates market size data, another might be gathering competitor information, and a third could be looking at regulatory considerations. This parallel approach means you get thorough results faster.

Iterative Refinement — Research is rarely a one-shot process. The Research plugin supports follow-up questions, scope adjustments, and deepening exploration of specific areas. You can start broad and narrow down, or start specific and expand outward.

The Enterprise Search plugin solves one of the most persistent problems in modern organizations: information is scattered across dozens of tools, and finding what you need can take longer than creating it from scratch.

With Enterprise Search, Cowork can search across your connected company tools — your document management system, your project management platform, your communication channels, your knowledge base — and surface relevant information in seconds.

Cross-Platform Search — Instead of opening Slack, then Google Drive, then Confluence, then Notion, you ask Cowork one question and it searches across all connected platforms simultaneously. The MCP connectors handle the integration; you just ask your question in plain language.

Contextual Results — Enterprise Search does not just return a list of links. It reads the relevant documents, synthesizes the information, and gives you an answer with references back to the source documents. If you ask "What was decided about the pricing change in last month's product review?" Cowork will find the meeting notes, the follow-up emails, and the updated pricing document, then give you a clear summary.

Permission-Aware — Enterprise Search respects the access controls of your connected tools. It only searches and surfaces information you have permission to see, maintaining your organization's security boundaries.

The Enterprise Search plugin is especially valuable for new team members who do not yet know where information lives, and for cross-functional projects where relevant context is spread across multiple teams' tools.