[FEATURE] Enable Cowork Scheduled Tasks to Access Conversation Search Tools

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

I’m an Enterprise plan user (Director of AI at a 2,100-person organisation) and I use Claude as my primary thinking and working tool across every part of my role — governance, strategy, tool development, stakeholder management, client programmes. Over months of daily use, I’ve built up hundreds of conversations that collectively represent my operational working memory.
I want to use Cowork’s scheduled tasks to create a daily operations review that:

1. Searches my recent Claude conversations for decisions, actions, and open threads
2. Checks my Outlook inbox (connected via the enterprise connector) for related emails
3. Cross-references the two — matching email activity against chat-based commitments
4. Writes a unified briefing to a persistent file

The problem: Cowork cannot access the conversation_search or recent_chats tools that are available in standard Claude chat. This means scheduled tasks can pull from Outlook, search the web, and write to local files — but they are completely blind to the richest source of context I have, which is my own Claude conversation history.
I tested this directly. Cowork has no visibility of past chats. The chat search tools are only available in standard chat (standalone or project-scoped).

Proposed Solution

Expose the conversation_search and recent_chats tools to Cowork sessions (including scheduled tasks), with the same scoping rules that apply in standard chat:
∙ When running outside a project: search all non-project conversations
∙ When running inside a project: search that project’s conversations (existing behaviour) with an optional flag to include non-project conversations
This feels like a permissions and plumbing problem rather than a new capability — the tools exist, the infrastructure exists, they just need to be made available in the Cowork context.

Alternative Solutions

Related Issues
∙ #8648 — Enable Cross-Project Conversation Search and Context Access
∙ #25833 — Allow Claude Code & Cowork to access Claude Chat Project knowledge bases
∙ #15542 — Enable Claude Code to access chat history in Claude App
All of these describe variations of the same fundamental problem: context built in one Claude surface is invisible to another, even for the same authenticated user working on the same topics.

Priority

Critical - Blocking my work

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

For power users on Enterprise plans, Claude isn’t just a Q&A tool — it’s where decisions get made, strategies get refined, and actions get agreed. The conversation history isn’t incidental; it’s core operational context. Without it, Cowork’s scheduled tasks can only produce shallow email summaries rather than the connected, context-rich briefings that would make them genuinely transformative.
Right now, every path to solving this has a gap:
∙ Standard chat can search conversations and access Outlook, but can’t be scheduled or write to files
∙ Cowork can be scheduled and write to files and access Outlook, but can’t search conversations
∙ Projects scope chat search to project-only conversations, missing the bulk of working history
No combination of these surfaces delivers the full workflow.

Additional Context

This would turn Cowork from a capable file and email automation tool into a genuine personal operations agent for Enterprise users — which is, as far as I can tell, exactly what the product is trying to become.