Welcome to episode 338 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, Matt, and Jonathan are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including a bit of a buying spree (inlcuding whole power companies) Veo 3.1, Cowork, and more – today in the cloud!

• Snowflake’s Ironic Timing: Buying Downtime Prevention Tool While Experiencing Downtime
• Flexera Buys ProsperOps and Chaos Genius, Promises Less Chaos and More Prosperity
• Flexera Goes Shopping: Two FinOps Acquisitions to Prosper and Reduce Chaos
• Token of Appreciation: Gemini CLI Now Tracks Every Penny of Your AI Spend
• Snowflake Buys Observe to Stop Its Own Services from Melting Down
• Google’s Veo 3.1 Goes Vertical: Finally Understanding How People Actually Hold Their Phones
• Alphabet’s New Power Move: Buying the Company That Literally Powers Data Centers
• Dashboard Confessional: Gemini CLI Gets Transparent About Its Usage
• Microsoft’s New Agent Works 24/7 and Never Asks for a Raise
• From Robot Vacuums That Climb Stairs to TVs You Can’t Feel: CES Gets Weird
• Agent Shopping: When Your AI Has Better Taste Than You Do
• The cloudpod hosts do not like any stories this week
• AWS took a nap on announcements this week
• Claude is my new co-worker
• Wake up, AWS, and give us some fun news
• The $200 Assistant: Is Cowork the End of Workplace Admins?
• Azure has more interesting announcements than AWS oh noooo
• If you can’t beat them in AI, just acquire everyone
• Notebook LM turns the Data Tables on you

01:11 Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Code-like for general computing – Ars Technica

• Anthropic launches Cowork, a new feature in the macOS Claude desktop app that extends Claude Code‘s agentic capabilities to general office work tasks.
• Users can grant Claude access to specific folders and use plain language instructions to automate tasks like filling expense reports from receipt photos, writing reports from notes, or reorganizing files.
• Cowork lowers the technical barrier compared to Claude Code by making AI-assisted file operations accessible to non-developer knowledge workers, including marketers and office staff.
• The feature was developed after Anthropic observed users already applying Claude Code to general knowledge work despite its developer-focused positioning.
• The tool provides similar functionality to what was possible through Model Context Protocol integrations, but offers a more streamlined interface with Claude Code-style usability improvements.
• Users can submit new requests or modifications to ongoing tasks without waiting for the initial assignment to complete.
• Cowork represents a strategic expansion of Anthropic’s agentic AI approach beyond software development into broader productivity workflows. The feature demonstrates how AI agents with file system access can automate routine knowledge work tasks that previously required manual processing of documents and data.

02:15 Ryan – “This week is the first time I actually tried to use AI to generate a PowerPoint presentation. It did not go well. It did gener...