Every marketer needs an assistant. Now you can have two.

Just a few days ago, we wrote about Claude Cowork and called it the closest thing to general intelligence we’ve seen in practice.

Peter Benei and Torsten Sandor, 22 January 2026

Just a few days ago, we wrote about Claude Cowork and called it the closest thing to general intelligence we’ve seen in practice. Give it a folder, point it at the web, and watch it plan, execute, and deliver. It felt like a genuine shift.

Cowork can read your actual files on your drive: meeting transcripts, campaign briefs, competitor research, content calendars. Then it can cross-reference it with live web data, synthesize it, and hand you something useful. No copy-pasting into a chat window or manual context-building. You describe an outcome, it figures out the steps.

Now there’s competition.

MiniMax, the Chinese AI lab behind the surprisingly capable M2.1 model, just launched a desktop version of their Agent. It is so new that they haven’t even announced it yet officially, but it is already available for download. Same concept: local file access, web research, autonomous task execution. The M2.1 model has what some experts call a “Claude smell”—similar reasoning patterns, similar tone—which makes it feel warmly familiar if you’ve spent time with Anthropic’s flagship. Both tools now cost $19 per month at the entry tier. The difference: MiniMax also runs on Windows, while Claude Cowork is still Mac-only.

I ran both through identical tests.

The first task was analyzing a folder of meeting transcripts and surface everything discussed about an ongoing project:

You are working in an Obsidian vault. I’d like to know everything about the [Project Name] project. What is it, what is its current status and what are the next steps? You especially pay attention to the Granola folder, but you can check others as well.

Both found the relevant information, but MiniMax went further. It pulled out specific cost options from different conversations and added a “key risks and challenges” section without being asked. Claude’s answer was competent. MiniMax’s felt thorough.

The second test:

Review yesterday’s saved articles and clippings (I am notorious for saving longform articles for “later reading”), summarize the key ideas, broader patterns, and highlight what’s worth returning to.

Here, they performed identically. Both outputs were informative, useful, and very well-written.

I expected MiniMax to feel noticeably dumber. It didn’t. Never for a second have I felt that one tool is from one of the world’s leading AI labs (or, arguably, the leading AI lab), and the other from a rather obscure Chinese company.

Personal AI assistants aren’t coming. They’re here, and both the MiniMax Agent and Claude Cowork can do a surprising amount of useful work. The exercise alone is valuable: it forces you to think about how you store information, where your workflows leak time, and what you’d delegate if you could.

If you haven’t tried them yet, this week is the week.

— Torsten and Peter

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