Claude Cowork use case: Automating repetitive browser work

Sharing this for inspiration. I automated an annoying and time-consuming bit of admin work in the browser with a scheduled Cowork task.

Most of you won’t have the exact same use case, but many probably have some kind of repetitive browser work that you can automate in a similar way.

What I did:

I automated the publisher application approval and rejection process across five affiliate network accounts I manage.

Before: Every time one of the 5 accounts received an application (10 to 15 applications per account per week), I would get an email notification. Every few days, I would log in and go through all open applications manually to accept or reject them.

Now: A scheduled Cowork session runs once a week (Wednesday mornings) and uses the Chrome extension to go through all open applications across the 5 accounts and accepts or rejects them, based on criteria I defined. The only thing I still have to do manually is make sure I’m logged in to the affiliate network in my browser. And the best part: No more email notifications in my inbox.

Why I did it:

This kind of task is a time and attention sink, but it has to be done. The affiliate network does not offer an API integration or any other automated way to accept or reject applications, so the only way I could think of was a browser automation.

How I did it:

Whenever I work with scheduled tasks, I keep the instructions within the scheduled task very brief and put the details in a skill that the task loads. I do this mainly because skills are easier to improve and update than scheduled tasks.

The skill instructs the task to use the Chrome extension to navigate to the publisher application page in each of the five accounts.

One required manual step:

There’s a very important rule in the workflow right at the beginning: If the affiliate network’s login page is hit, the task waits for me to log in manually. The browser extension is not able to fill in the login form.

This step does not cause a lot of friction, as I quickly notice the open tab in the browser or the scheduled task in Cowork that needs my feedback. It’s literally a five-second job to log in.

In a case like this, it’s important to have the skill instruct Cowork to wait for the user to log in, instead of aborting the task.

The rest of the workflow is 100% autonomous:

I defined acceptance and rejection criteria in the skill that the scheduled task uses to decide about every single application. The criteria are based on the publisher type (e.g. “reject all coupon sites”), industry focus (e.g. “always accept automotive”) and language and content of the application, among other factors. They are slightly different per account.

The result:

This automation saves me quite a bit of time every week and the best thing is that it reduces noise significantly. Before, I kept the email notifications on so I wouldn’t forget about the applications. Now, I can trust the weekly scheduled task to do the job and I just briefly scan the report it creates for me after every run.

Discussion:

Do you have repetitive browser work that you could automate this way? Or have you found a different Claude setup for browser automations? Also happy to answer any questions you might have about my workflow.