Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rama Ramakrishnan for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Patrick George/Ikon Images
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Agentic AI coding tools like Claude Code are not just for developers. Versatile capabilities make them widely relevant for leaders and knowledge workers.
Let’s explore what distinguishes these tools from the AI chatbots that are accessed through a browser or a desktop app (like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini) and consider several noncoding examples that convey the broad applicability of these tools for personal and enterprise work.
Knowledge Work With an AI Chatbot Like Claude
Imagine that you have an important meeting coming up with a new sales prospect. You want to be well prepared: You’d like to know about recent company and industry news, what the person and company have been posting on social media, and other relevant background information. This will involve visiting multiple websites and synthesizing everything into a briefing you can review with the team before meeting the prospect.
Since AI chatbots can visit web pages and extract information, you can use them to speed up part of this process. You go to the web interface (or desktop app) of your favorite chatbot and prompt the AI:
Research this person [LinkedIn URL] and their company [company URL]. Find recent news about the company and industry. Summarize what I should know before meeting with them. Create a one-page briefing document.
After some back-and-forth to refine the output and ensure its correctness, you download the briefing document and share it with the team.
This works reasonably well and is certainly faster than doing it without an AI tool. But what happens before your next client meeting? You may need to scroll back through your chat history to find the original prompt, copy it into a new session, swap in the new client details, and iterate through the refinement process again. If a colleague wants to prepare for their own meetings the same way, you’d send them the prompt via email or Slack, along with instructions on how to adapt it.
In other words, conversational AI tools are good at producing a one-time output, but they don’t easily support repeatable workflows. Each time you need to prepare for a meeting, you’re essentially starting from scratch.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could automate this into a reusable capability — something you or a teammate could run in seconds before an external meeting?
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References (1)
1. By “coding tool,” I am referring to command-line tools like Claude Code or their nontechnical versions, like Claude Cowork.