What Are Connectors?
Connectors are the bridges between Cowork and your favorite external services. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard, they enable Claude to interact directly with tools like Canva, Figma, Slack, and Asana without requiring manual context switching. Instead of copying and pasting information between applications, you can leverage Claude's intelligence to work seamlessly across your entire software ecosystem.
Think of connectors as specialized agents that understand each service's unique language and capabilities. When you request an action—whether it's creating a design, analyzing data, or managing tasks—the connector translates your intent into the appropriate API calls and returns results directly into your conversation.
Your Connected Service Toolkit
Cowork currently supports integrations with several major platforms, each opening different possibilities for automation and analysis.
Canva stands out as a creative powerhouse. You can search through your design library, edit existing presentations and documents, and export polished materials in multiple formats. One of the most practical applications is generating presentations from templates and immediately exporting them as PDFs. Instead of manually building slides one by one, you can describe your presentation topic, let Claude generate a structured outline, create the slides from a Canva template, and export the final product—all within one conversation.
Figma brings your design systems into the AI workflow. Extract components, inspect styling information, and understand your design library's structure. This becomes incredibly powerful when combined with code generation. Imagine describing a React component you need built, having Claude analyze your Figma design file to understand the exact colors, typography, and spacing, then generating code that matches your design system perfectly.
Slack transforms team communication into actionable intelligence. Analyze channel messages to understand discussions, sentiment, and decisions. Generate reports summarizing key points from threads. Create notifications that alert your team when specific conditions are met. This connector lets you turn chat histories into insights without manual review.
Asana integrates task management into your workflow. View project status, track task progress, and understand team workload. Claude can help you identify bottlenecks, suggest reallocation of resources, and keep everyone synchronized on project status without requiring constant manual status checks.
Google Drive and Box provide document access and file management capabilities. Retrieve necessary context from your stored documents, manage files, and integrate document data into larger workflows. This is particularly useful when you need to pull information from multiple sources to create comprehensive reports or analyses.
GitHub enables intelligent repository management. Create issues, manage pull requests, review code changes, and automate common development workflows. Claude can analyze your codebase issues, suggest PRs for review, and help coordinate development activities.
Connecting Your Services
Getting started is refreshingly simple. Within the Cowork interface, you'll find a connection panel where available services are displayed. Click on any service you want to integrate, and Cowork will guide you through a streamlined OAuth authentication flow. This means you're granting Cowork secure, permission-specific access to your account—not sharing passwords or credentials.
Once connected, the service appears as available within Claude's context. You don't need to manually select or configure anything for each request. Your connected services are simply there, ready to be used when relevant.
MCP Apps: Direct Tool Integration
As of January 2026, Cowork introduced MCP Apps, a significant evolution in how Claude interacts with external services. Rather than working through traditional connectors alone, MCP Apps allow you to operate tools directly within Claude's chat interface. Tools become native capabilities—you can use them exactly as you would use any built-in Claude function, with full visibility into what's happening and direct control over each action.
This means you're not just connecting to services; you're bringing their power directly into your conversation. When you need to search for a Canva design or update an Asana task, the interaction feels as native as any other Claude capability.
Real-World Examples
Creating and Exporting a Presentation
You're preparing for a quarterly business review. Instead of opening Canva, creating slides manually, and exporting the file, you simply tell Claude: "Generate a presentation about Q1 results with our company's template, including sections on revenue growth, customer acquisition, and product roadmap, then export it as PDF."
Claude uses the Canva connector to find your company template, generates a structured outline, creates the slides with your branding, and exports the final PDF—all in one request. You get a polished presentation ready for your meeting.
Analyzing Team Communication
You want to understand what your engineering team discussed in Slack this month. Ask Claude to analyze messages from your #engineering channel, summarize key decisions, identify blockers, and flag action items. The Slack connector retrieves the conversation history, Claude processes it, and you receive a clear summary highlighting important patterns without reading through hundreds of messages manually.
Building Components from Design
Your design team created mockups in Figma for a new dashboard. Rather than manually translating those designs to code, describe to Claude what you need: "Create a React component for the dashboard widget shown in our Figma design file, matching the exact colors, spacing, and typography."
Claude accesses your Figma file, extracts the styling information and component structure, and generates React code that matches your design system. The result is code that's visually accurate and maintains consistency with your broader design system.
When to Use Claude in Chrome
While connectors handle direct service integration beautifully, some situations call for browser automation via Claude in Chrome. When no connector exists for a service you need, or when a task requires human-like browser interaction that traditional APIs can't support, Claude in Chrome becomes your fallback. This browser automation capability lets you interact with almost any web application directly.
Use Claude in Chrome when you're working with niche tools, legacy systems, or when the interaction you need goes beyond what a connector provides. It's more flexible but slightly less streamlined than connectors—a worthwhile tradeoff when no direct integration exists.
Getting the Most from Connectors
The real power of connectors emerges when you combine them strategically. Pull data from Slack to identify team blockers, create a presentation analyzing those patterns in Canva, add relevant code snippets from your GitHub repository, and share the complete analysis with your team through Asana. What would take hours of context switching now flows in one conversation.
Start by connecting the services you use most frequently. Then experiment with requests that span multiple tools. As you discover workflows that work well, you'll find connectors becoming an invisible part of how you work—a multiplier on your productivity that makes AI assistance feel like a natural extension of your toolkit.
Connectors represent a shift in how we think about AI assistance: not as isolated tools, but as intelligent coordinators capable of orchestrating work across your entire digital ecosystem. When your AI knows how to access the services and data you actually use, it becomes infinitely more useful.