Claude Dispatch Setup Guide: Control Your AI Agent From Your Phone

Most knowledge workers don't spend their entire day at a desktop. Meetings, travel, site visits, commutes — a significant chunk of productive thinking happens away from a keyboard. Claude Dispatch is Anthropic's answer to that problem: a mobile companion app for Claude Cowork that lets you trigger AI workflows, review completed tasks, send voice instructions to your AI agent, and monitor what your desktop Claude is working on — all from your phone.

This guide covers everything you need to get Claude Dispatch working in an enterprise environment: the initial setup process, enterprise admin configuration, workflow trigger design, push notification management, mobile security controls, and the specific use cases where Dispatch creates the most value. If you haven't deployed Claude Cowork yet, start with our Claude Cowork enterprise deployment guide first — Dispatch requires an active Cowork deployment to function.

What Claude Dispatch Actually Is

Claude Dispatch is not a standalone AI assistant. It's a mobile control layer for Claude Cowork — think of it as a remote control for the AI agent running on your desktop. When you send a voice note via Dispatch, you're not talking to a separate AI instance; you're sending a task to your Cowork agent, which uses the same model (Claude Opus or Sonnet), the same plugins, and the same context it has at your desktop.

This distinction matters for enterprise deployments because it means Dispatch inherits Cowork's security posture. The data governance, audit logging, plugin permissions, and SSO configuration you set in the Cowork admin console applies to Dispatch sessions as well. You're not opening a new security surface — you're extending an existing, governed surface to mobile.

For a deeper look at the full Claude Dispatch product, our product guide covers the complete feature set. This article focuses specifically on the setup and configuration process.

Prerequisites Before You Set Up Dispatch

Claude Dispatch requires three things to be in place before the setup process begins. Missing any of them will produce errors that can take hours to diagnose if you don't know to look for them.

First, you need an active Claude Enterprise subscription that includes Dispatch access. Dispatch is available on the Max plan and above — it's not included in the Pro plan. Verify your plan tier in the Cowork admin console before attempting to configure Dispatch for your organisation.

Second, users must have the Cowork desktop application installed and signed in. Dispatch works by connecting to an active Cowork instance — it can queue tasks if Cowork is offline, but it cannot operate without ever having established a connection. Enterprise admins deploying Dispatch alongside initial Cowork rollouts should complete the Cowork installation phase first and verify it's functioning before enabling Dispatch.

Third, push notifications must be enabled at the organisation level. This is an admin console setting that's off by default in enterprise deployments for data minimisation reasons. You'll need to explicitly enable it and configure which notification types are permitted. We cover this in the admin configuration section below.

Installation: Getting Dispatch on Users' Phones

Enterprise Admin Configuration

Most of the work for enterprise Dispatch deployment happens in the admin console, not on individual devices. Here's what you need to configure before rolling out to your user base.

Notification Policy

The admin console's Dispatch section has a notification policy panel. You can configure: which notification types are permitted at the org level (recommended: allow completion alerts and approval requests; disable raw content previews for high-sensitivity organisations), whether notification content is shown in lock screen previews (recommended: disable for regulated industries), and the maximum notification frequency per user per hour to prevent notification fatigue.

For financial services and healthcare deployments, we recommend setting lock screen previews to "show notification but not content" — users know they have a task to review without displaying potentially sensitive information on an unlocked phone screen in a public space.

Mobile Session Security

Dispatch sessions inherit the authentication from your SSO configuration, but there are additional mobile-specific security settings to configure. Set the session timeout — how long a Dispatch session stays active without re-authentication. The default is 24 hours; we recommend 8 hours for enterprise use. Enable biometric re-authentication for any task that involves write operations (sending instructions, approving outputs, triggering workflows). Configure the remote session kill switch, which lets admins invalidate all active Dispatch sessions for a specific user from the admin console — essential for offboarding.

Permission Scoping

Not all plugins that are active in a user's desktop Cowork session should be accessible via Dispatch. A contract review plugin that requires careful attention to detail is not appropriate for a hurried mobile interaction. Use the admin console's plugin-level Dispatch access settings to define which plugins can be triggered from mobile and which require the desktop interface. This is a governance decision, not a technical constraint — configure it deliberately based on the nature of each plugin and the risk of mobile-triggered actions.

Designing Workflow Triggers for Dispatch

The most powerful feature of Claude Dispatch isn't checking on tasks — it's triggering pre-built workflows from a single tap on your phone. A well-designed Dispatch workflow trigger is the difference between "open Cowork, navigate to the right context, write out the task" and "tap 'Daily Briefing' and it's ready by the time you get to your desk."

Workflow triggers are created in the Cowork desktop app. Open the Workflows panel, create a new workflow, and mark it as "Dispatch-accessible." This makes the workflow appear as a tile in the Dispatch app's main interface. You can create up to 20 Dispatch-accessible workflows per user account; enterprise admins can also push shared workflows to all users or specific user groups.

High-Value Workflow Trigger Patterns

Morning briefing trigger: A workflow that pulls the user's calendar for the day, retrieves recent email threads on key topics, summarises overnight developments from monitored sources, and produces a structured briefing document. Trigger it from the phone during the commute; it's ready when you arrive. This is one of the most consistently high-value Dispatch workflows we've seen across deployments.

Meeting prep trigger: Triggered 30–60 minutes before a calendar event, this workflow pulls information about attendees, retrieves recent correspondence related to the meeting topic, summarises relevant documents, and produces a one-page prep note. Users connect their calendar via the Cowork connectors to enable this — Dispatch sees the calendar event and surfaces the trigger at the right time.

Approval queue trigger: For managers who need to review AI-generated drafts, a workflow trigger that aggregates pending approvals — draft emails, documents, or outputs generated by Claude that require human review before sending — into a single review queue accessible from Dispatch. The mobile interface shows summaries; tapping opens the full content for review and one-tap approve or revise.

Task delegation trigger: A voice-input workflow where you describe a task verbally ("Draft a follow-up to the Meridian proposal, focus on the pricing concerns they raised") and Dispatch converts the voice note to text, sends it to your Cowork agent, and notifies you when the draft is ready. The voice processing happens server-side via Claude Sonnet — it's not a dumb transcription, it's contextual understanding of what you're asking for.

Security Considerations for Mobile AI Agent Access

Extending your AI agent to mobile introduces a security surface that requires deliberate configuration. The risks are not dramatic — Dispatch uses the same authentication and authorisation model as Cowork — but mobile devices have different risk profiles from managed desktops, and your security configuration should reflect that.

The main concern is device compromise: if a user's phone is compromised (via malware, physical theft, or shoulder-surfing), an active Dispatch session could be used to trigger AI workflows or review sensitive outputs. Mitigations are straightforward: require biometric authentication for any plugin that accesses sensitive data, set short session timeouts, enable remote session kill in your MDM, and configure notification content masking so sensitive information isn't visible on lock screens.

For regulated industries, verify with your compliance team whether mobile AI agent access requires additional DLP controls. Some financial services organisations add a data classification check to Dispatch workflows — if the AI is working with data classified above a certain sensitivity level, the Dispatch interface shows summaries only and requires the desktop app for full access.

Our Claude security and governance service includes a mobile AI access policy template developed for financial services and healthcare deployments, which you can adapt to your organisation's requirements.

Where Dispatch Delivers the Most Value

After deploying Dispatch across dozens of enterprise environments, certain use cases consistently produce the highest return. They share a common pattern: the user needs AI assistance in a context where opening a laptop is impractical, but the task is well-defined enough to execute reliably from a mobile trigger.

If you're evaluating whether Dispatch will drive meaningful adoption in your team, read our enterprise deployment guide for data on adoption patterns across different user segments. The short version: Dispatch has the highest adoption rates among users who travel frequently or have significant meeting loads — people who spend the least time at their desks.

For teams looking to build out the full Cowork deployment including Dispatch, our Claude training workshops include a dedicated Dispatch module that covers workflow trigger design and mobile security configuration with hands-on exercises.

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