Ivee Claude Cowork Workshop
From chat to workflows people already recognise.
The question I was chasing
Could I deliver a meaningful Claude Cowork demo that covered the essentials, showed what the tool can do, and left people ready to try it on their own work?
Ivee is the UK government's official AI events provider. They contracted me for one live online session for 150 attendees, with widely different experience levels in the room. Covering the key parts was only half the job. The other half was keeping the momentum: one eye on the chat, enough engagement that people left inspired to take it into their own workflows and try things for themselves.
The constraints
150 people and one hour. The constraint was attention and time: get the room with me, then run a series of live demos before the hour was gone.
Inside that window the session also had to tell the story of how the technology has been changing, keep it accessible across a mixed room, and leave people inspired by what AI is increasingly capable of.
The decisions that mattered
Build the session as workflows people recognise. Someone with a pile of tasks on their desk had to be able to follow the story. We started with receipts and invoices inside a folder: Cowork reading the files, using vision to pull the details, then building the expense report from them.
Take Claude outside the desktop app. Claude in Chrome summarised blog posts into short social posts, then we went back into Claude and handed them to Canva through its connector (the plug that lets Claude talk to another app) to build actual pieces of creative. Bridging those two workflows was the point: the same work moving across tools, not stuck in one window.
End on a skill, not on a demo. The demos showed the chain once. Building it into a Claude skill in front of the room turned that path into something they could rerun: blog post in, short social posts out, Canva producing the visuals. The session finished on one command.
Built with: Claude Cowork, Claude in Chrome, Claude Skills, Canva connector, MCP
Where it landed
A meaningful live demo across different pieces of functionality, built on workflows people recognise. We showed how Claude can reach other apps, then bundled the chain into a skill so the room could see how the same work could be automated.
None of it was pre-recorded. People could ask questions, watch the process, and hear it talked through as it happened. Interactive and engaging in a way a static course cannot be.
Part of the Rolling Waves work archive.