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The Kowalah Plugin puts your AI Operating Model inside Claude. It bundles the Kowalah Claude Connector with ten skills that know how to read your map honestly, talk a process through, keep track of the AI your organization actually has and what it has delivered, and take an idea to your Kowalah team in a form the triage queue can actually use. The plugin is listed in Anthropic’s plugin directory, so you can find it in Claude under Customize > Plugins > Discover without adding anything first, or open the Kowalah listing directly. Install it once and Claude stops being a general assistant and starts being someone who knows your organization’s vision, your processes, your constraints, and what is already in flight.
You do not need a Kowalah engagement to start. Signing in with your work email creates your account and places you in an organization. If your company already works with Kowalah, you join its organization. If it does not, you get a new organization of your own, as its admin, with an empty operating model ready to map. See Building your model from nothing. Every tool is scoped to the organizations you belong to.

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Who it is for

AI programme leads

You are accountable for AI across the organization or a division. Where is the business constrained, is the work in flight aimed there, what happens next.

Process owners

You own a real business process. Where does the time actually go, does this need redesigning or automating, how do you know the AI is doing it right.

Everyone else

You have no formal role in the map. Talk through your own work, find where AI could help, and log what is worth doing.
Everyone in your organization can read the whole operating model, whatever their role, and can propose a change to any process they can see. What you can edit directly depends on where you sit. See Your operating model in Claude.

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What’s included

Ten skills, plus the Kowalah Claude Connector wired up and ready to authenticate. You do not have to remember the names. The skills activate on their own when the conversation fits, and typing / in a chat shows the full list. In Claude Code, the skills are namespaced with the plugin name, for example /kowalah:programme-review.
The model is the context layer. Your operating model already holds the owners, steps, timings, constraints and quality bars, so the skills look there before they ask you anything and only ask for what is genuinely missing. Where something is not recorded they say so, rather than filling the gap from the conversation, and they check how old the vision and quality readings are before leaning on them.You can see more than you can change. Reads are scoped to your organization, not your role, so anyone can look at the whole operating model and vision map. Writes are permission-checked, and where you cannot edit something the skills route you to a proposal instead of refusing. The path that is always open: see anything, propose anything.A null is “can’t say”, never “none”. Process diagnostics return blanks where the data is incomplete, for example a handoff count when a step has no owner, or a cycle ratio when a step has never been timed. The skills surface those gaps rather than rounding them to zero, because an unmeasured process reading as a healthy one is the expensive mistake.Work is measured in minutes, processes are measured in days. A process that is 0.4% work and 99.6% waiting cannot be fixed by making the work faster. Where the data supports it, the diagnostic leads with that ratio, because it usually changes what the conversation is about.

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Install it

How you install depends on your Claude plan. On Claude Team and Enterprise, which is most Kowalah clients, your Claude workspace Owner decides which plugins and connectors your organization can use, so they set Kowalah up first and you add it afterwards. On Pro or Max, you do it all yourself.

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For your Claude workspace Owner

Two things have to happen before anyone in your organization can use the plugin: the plugin has to be available, and the connector has to be added. They are separate settings, and the plugin does not work without both.
Only Claude workspace Owners and Primary Owners can do this, plus Enterprise members whose custom role includes managing libraries.
1

Make the plugin available

Go to Organization settings > Plugins & skills.
  1. Open the Marketplaces tab and check that Anthropic Directory is listed. If it has been removed, add it back with Add > Add marketplace > Browse Anthropic sources.
  2. Open the Inventory tab, search for Kowalah, and check its access. Make sure the copy whose Source is Anthropic Directory reads Everyone · can install. If it doesn’t, open its menu, select Default access, and choose Available to install.
A directory plugin can only be Available to install or Not available. To install it for people automatically, or make it required, upload the .zip instead (see Upload instead of using the directory below).
2

Add the connector

Making a plugin available does not add the connector it bundles. Anthropic’s plugin admin guide says so directly, and if you skip this step, members’ skills load but every tool call fails.Go to Organization settings > Connectors, select Add, then Custom, and choose Web if asked. Enter https://mcp.kowalah.com/api/mcp, name it Kowalah, and click Add. Members then connect it with their own accounts. See Set up in Claude.
3

Tell people where to find it

Send your team a line like: “Kowalah is now available in Claude. Open Customize > Plugins > Discover, add Kowalah, then connect it from the plugin’s Connectors tab with your work email.” Or share the Kowalah listing directly.
Check for an older copy. If your organization uploaded the Kowalah .zip in the past, the Inventory tab shows two Kowalah plugins, and members see both in Discover. Keep the one from Anthropic Directory, which updates itself, and set the uploaded one to Not available.
On Enterprise plans you can decide which groups get the plugin and the connector.
  • The plugin: on the Inventory tab, open Kowalah’s menu and select Group access…. A group’s setting replaces the organization-wide one for its members, even when it is stricter, so you can keep Kowalah Not available for everyone and make it Available to install for your AI programme team. If someone is in several groups, the most permissive setting applies.
  • The connector: connectors are added for the whole organization, so you restrict them through custom roles rather than switching them on per group. A role can set a connector to Always allow, Needs approval, or Blocked, which hides it from members with that role. You assign roles through groups. See Anthropic’s role-based permissions guide, and check that it covers Kowalah in your organization: the guide describes connectors added by an Owner, and Kowalah is one people sign in to individually.
Uploading the .zip gives you all four access settings, including Installed by default and Required, but it does not update itself.
  1. Download kowalah-plugin.zip. That link always serves the latest release, where the release notes say what changed. Safari can automatically unzip downloads, so if you get a folder, re-compress it, or untick Open safe files after downloading under Safari > Settings > General.
  2. In Organization settings > Plugins & skills, select Add, then Upload a plugin, and choose the .zip.
  3. On the Inventory tab, open the plugin’s menu, select Default access, and choose the setting you want.
  4. When we release a new version, open the plugin’s menu and select Upload new version. Version history lets you compare versions and revert.
If the directory copy is also available, set it to Not available so members don’t see two.

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For everyone else in the organization

Once your Owner has done the above:
1

Add Kowalah from Discover

Open the Kowalah listing in Claude, or open Customize > Plugins > Discover and search for Kowalah. Click Add.
2

Connect the connector

Open the plugin from Customize > Plugins and select its Connectors tab. Connect Kowalah and sign in with your work email. The email domain is what places you in your company’s organization, so a personal address cannot reach it.
3

Run /kowalah-setup

Start a new chat and type /kowalah-setup. It confirms the connection and tells you which organization you landed in and what your role can see.
Kowalah not in your Discover tab, or its connector shows “Not added”? Your Owner hasn’t finished the setup above. Members on Team and Enterprise plans cannot add the connector themselves, so send your Owner a link to this page.
Want to read the source before you install it? The plugin is public at kowalah-dev/kowalah-plugin. Every skill is plain markdown, so you can browse the repository, or drop the expanded folder into a Claude conversation and ask what it does. Past versions and release notes are on the releases page.

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If the skills return nothing

If your company does not work with Kowalah yet, empty results are expected: you are in your own new organization, and the model is yours to build. See Building your model from nothing. If your company does work with Kowalah, the most common problem is not a broken install. It is an account that authenticated successfully but landed in a new, empty organization rather than your company’s existing one. This happens when your email domain is not yet registered with your company’s Kowalah organization. Claude signs you in, creates an organization for you, and every skill then returns valid but empty results with nothing to explain why.
The organization’s name will not tell you. A new organization is named from your email domain, so signing up on a work address produces one named after your own employer. It can look entirely legitimate and still be empty.
Run /kowalah-setup and it checks for this. The signs are all of these together:
  • exactly one organization, and your role in it is admin
  • an operating model with one unit and no processes
  • no vision map
  • no projects, deliverables or Expert Requests, despite that admin role
If that is what you see and your company already has a Kowalah organization, your account needs attaching to the right one. Your Kowalah contact or your organization’s AI lead can sort it out. Nothing in the plugin can fix it from your side.

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Troubleshooting

The plugin is installed but the connector is not. Adding a plugin never connects its connector for you, and on Team and Enterprise plans an Owner has to add the connector for the organization first. Open the plugin from Customize > Plugins and check its Connectors tab. If Kowalah shows Not connected, connect it. If it shows Not added and you cannot add it, ask your Claude workspace Owner to add https://mcp.kowalah.com/api/mcp under Organization settings > Connectors, then connect it. See Set up in Claude.
Search for “Kowalah” in Customize > Plugins > Discover. On a Team or Enterprise plan, it only appears once your Claude workspace Owner has made it available, so ask them to follow the Owner steps above.
Type / in a chat, or click the + button. Only skills from installed plugins appear in the menu, so check Kowalah shows under Customize > Plugins in your installed list. In Claude Code, remember the skills are namespaced, for example /kowalah:kowalah-setup.
Two different things look identical here. Either no operating model has been mapped for your organization yet, which is work your Kowalah team does with you during Define or that you can start yourself, or your account is in a new empty organization when it should have joined your company’s, covered above. Run /kowalah-setup to tell them apart.
For administrators uploading the .zip: the file must be a valid .zip under 50 MB. If your browser expanded the archive, re-compress the folder into a .zip before uploading.

MCP Server

The connector underneath the plugin, and how to set it up on its own

Your operating model in Claude

Reading the map, talking a process through, and what you can change

Available tools

What each connector tool does and how your role affects it

Concierge Plugins

Free role-based plugins that work without a Kowalah account