Discover the Zapier MCP + OpenAI Integration (MCP Integration Demo)

Full video transcript

I don’t know if you heard or not, but Zapier, MCP, and OpenAI just made a big announcement. Zapier has been one of the early companies that is adopting the MCP model context protocol, which is a newer way of making AI tools talk to each other in a more efficient and more effective process. The announcement from the founder of Zapier made earlier this week about their partnership with OpenAI and integrating with MCP, I think, is really telling of the future of where this technology is going and how easy it’s going to be to give your AI assistants access to different tools to take things off of your plate and to streamline and optimize your workflows.

So this update is, I think, a pretty big deal when it comes to showing where things are going to be going. And I want to show you very quickly how, with Zapier, you can connect it with OpenAI to start to see, at the very tip of the iceberg, what is going to be possible with this technology. And I think very soon you’ll see easier ways inside of your own ChatGPT to be able to integrate and plug into MCP servers, like we’ll show you how to do with Zapier. All right, check this out.

All right, so what we’re looking at here is Zapier’s MCP page, which you can get to at zapier.com/mcp. When you get started, you’ll notice that you can build your own new MCP servers. What this means is each of these servers can have access to a number of different tools. Once you have a server like this set up, like this Moxy Director I have set up down here, I could add additional tools to it, like Google Sheets, like Salesforce, like Gmail, and then all of these different tools I can integrate with OpenAI now, and give it access to being able to use these tools to take actions based on my commands.

So we can see this put into practice inside of OpenAI’s playground, which you can get to at platform.openai.com/playground. When you’re inside the playground and you head on over to prompts, you’ll see a blank screen with a way that you can have a conversation with said prompt. But how to get started with this very quickly is, one, by going to tools, selecting create, and when you click create, you can click MCP server. When you click MCP server, you have the option to tap into a few different platforms right out the gate, but also adding in your own MCP server, or selecting simply Zapier.

So I’m going to go ahead and select Zapier. And from here, all I’ve got to do is give it my Zapier API key. So I’m going to go back to Zapier now, and we’ll see — I’m going to even make a brand new server to show you exactly how easy it is to get started with this. I’ll go ahead and click new MCP server. I’m going to select the client, select OpenAI API, and I’m going to name it just demo. Once I’ve got my server set up, I can see that the client is OpenAI. And then I can see I can add tools.

The cool part about this is that Zapier is already connected to 8,000 plus tools, including the stuff that you probably already use, like Gmail. So when you go ahead and click add tool and you select Gmail, you can click add all Gmail tools, or you can go through and add each one individually. I’m going to select add all Gmail tools. I’ve already connected my Gmail account — it’s as simple as just logging in through the authentication. I’m adding all the Gmail tools.

Now, once I’ve got my tools added, I’m going to go up here to connect, at the top of my screen. What this is going to do is give me access to my API key that I need. So I’m going to copy this key, move back over to OpenAI, and simply click connect. Now OpenAI is connecting me with all of my Gmail tools.

And I’m going to say, you are my assistant that helps me with sending emails to people whenever I need to send an email to somebody — super simple system message for the purposes of this demonstration. But I’m going to show you now, with this tool inside of a brand new prompt in OpenAI, I’m going to save this as email assistant. Save.

Now I want you to write an email to derby@theauthor.com with the subject line “Did you see this new AI hackathon event?” and the body of the email will say, “I just posted a new video on YouTube. I wanted to see if you got the notification.” And I’m going to select enter, turning off my voice dictation. You can see now my assistant is already tapped into my Zapier. It knows that it wants to send an email, and it’s written out the email right here.

I select approve. So we say your email to Derby with the subject, “Did you see this new hackathon,” has been sent. The body says this — “Hi, [best your name]” — but it gave me this generated sign-off because I didn’t give it my sign-off name in this case. But let’s go ahead and see if that email was sent. And there you have it — the email was just sent directly to my Gmail with the subject and the body that it sent.

I can see some obvious areas where I could have improved what I was sending if my instruction was more clear. But for the sake of this demonstration, you see how fast you can connect up your OpenAI, create a prompt that’s an assistant that does a specific job, give it access to the tool it needs to do the job, and you can send it right from there.

That is just a taste into what MCP is going to enable — tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and you’ll see, obviously, Claude and Anthropic, since they came up with this protocol, and I think a lot more platforms adapting this technology at a much faster rate. At the end of the day, it’s going to make it easier for you to build tools that can help you with streamlining and doing the things that you need to get done faster and just easier than ever before.

So I hope that you find Zapier and OpenAI as helpful tools in your own AI integration journey. I would encourage you to not only learn this stuff, but also go and put it into practice. Make a free MCP account with Zapier and make an account with OpenAI and their playground, and see what you can connect and what you can bring to life and simplify in your life with this workflow.

All right, if you found that helpful, and if you know somebody who could benefit from learning stuff like this, make sure that you like, subscribe, and share, and drop a comment if you found anything specifically insightful — if you found these tools together useful in your own workflow, and also any other types of videos like this that you’d like to see us film next. All right, keep calm and AI on. I’ll see you on the other side. Cheers.