Use Cowork Subagents to 10x Your Productivity
By Miguel Torrez, founder of Genial Agency
You will have Claude Cowork list its built-in subagents, run one subagent on a quick market research task, then run four in parallel (one per country) and review their combined results.
What you need
Claude with access to Claude Cowork
A $100 or $200 Claude plan (subagents use a lot of tokens)
A research task you can split into parts, such as one per country
Step by step
Understand what a subagent does
A subagent is not independent: Claude Cowork calls it, gives it a task, and the subagent browses the web or reads documents, then sends its response back to Cowork. Several subagents can run at once, on different tasks or on the same task, instead of Cowork doing everything one at a time.
Ask Cowork which subagents it has
Open Claude Cowork and ask it to list its subagents. By default you get about five: Explore, General Purpose, Plan, Claude Code Guide and Status Line Setup. You cannot create new ones in Cowork yet.
PromptHey, Claude, can you please tell me which subagents you have access to, please?
Know the three that matter
Plan helps Cowork plan. Explore finds information when you do not know where it is, and runs on Haiku for speed. General Purpose (used here) runs on Opus or Sonnet. Each subagent can also use skills, like a small version of Cowork.
Run one subagent
Ask Cowork to use a single subagent for a quick research task. Cowork shows that it is running a subagent. The subagent uses the same model you selected in the conversation.
PromptHey, Claude, can you please use one subagent and conduct a very quick market research on the AI landscape in France, please?
Review the first result
When the result comes back, open the subagent's research details to check its sources. If needed, tell it which sources to look for next time.
Run several subagents in parallel
Ask for one subagent per country, doing the same research, and tell Cowork to run them all in parallel. Cowork starts them one after another until all are running.
PromptHey, Claude, can you please now use four different subagents, one for Italy, one for Germany, one for the US and one for Canada? Do the same type of research, and I want you to run them all in parallel.
Track each subagent
Once two or more are running, Cowork shows an overview of their work. Click any subagent to see which step it is on.
Read the combined results
When all four finish, Cowork gives you a brief summary for each one. From here you can ask subagents to go further, such as creating Excel files or trying different approaches to the same build.
Watch out for
Running subagents is like running several conversations at once and uses up tokens fast. I recommend the $100 or $200 plan.
Subagents use the model selected in your conversation, so check which model is active before starting several.
In Cowork you can only use the built-in subagents; you cannot create your own yet.
