Anthropic shipped Claude directly into Excel and PowerPoint last week — not as a separate app, not as a browser tab you alt-tab to, but as a resident inside the file you're already working in. Generate slides from a prompt. Build pivot tables by describing what you want. Edit charts, rewrite bullet points, restructure entire decks. All native objects, not screenshots or static images. You keep editing after Claude finishes.

The Cowork launch bundled this with customisable "plugins" — pre-configured agents for financial analysis, HR, design, operations — and the stock market responded like someone had pulled a fire alarm. A software industry ETF dropped nearly 6% in a single session. IBM had already lost 13% of its market cap over an Anthropic blog post about COBOL the day before. Two positioning statements, two market convulsions.

Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, told Fortune he thinks the title "software engineer" will start to disappear by the end of the year. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's own CEO, published an essay warning that AI will cause "unusually painful" disruption to jobs — a shock bigger than any before. When the people building the tool are this candid about the damage, the alarm feels earned.

But I keep snagging on specifics. The PowerPoint integration is a research preview. It doesn't support advanced features, loses chat history between sessions, and Anthropic themselves flag prompt injection risks from malicious templates. The Excel plugin handles pivot tables and conditional formatting, which is useful — genuinely — but the gap between "reformats a spreadsheet" and "replaces the analyst who understands what the numbers mean" is enormous.

The pattern is the same one playing out with AI-driven efficiency programmes in banking. Automation compresses the mechanical work. Headcount shrinks at the junior end. The people who survive are the ones who know which questions to ask, not which buttons to press. The spreadsheet jockey who builds one pivot table a week is not the person at risk. The person at risk is the one who builds fifty — because that volume is precisely the kind of repetitive, pattern-matching labour that an LLM handles well.

Anthropic is positioning Claude as the "default operational layer across enterprise workflows." L'Oréal, Deloitte, and Thomson Reuters are already deploying custom agents. The plugins are open-source and portable, which is a deliberate play against Microsoft's Copilot lock-in. Whether that matters depends on whether enterprises actually want portability or just want one vendor to blame when something breaks.

The job panic will continue. Some of it is justified. Most of it is aimed at the wrong targets.

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