Unlock Claude's Hidden Powers with Zapier MCP

Full video transcript

What’s going on y’all? Darby here at Gen AI University and in this video I’m going to share with you a way to add more to Claude’s capabilities through MCP. I’m going to share with you how to use MCP, model context protocol, inside of Claude and connecting it with additional connectors that may be outside of Claude’s native integration using Zapier MCP.

Now, Zapier MCP is what I found to be the easiest one to get started with in terms of building out additional connections that Claude can then talk to. You may also be able to do something similar to this if you are a little bit more technically savvy with tools like Make and n8n, but I won’t be getting into those in this example.

What I wanted to show you here inside of Claude was, very quickly, if you haven’t gone to the Search new tools section, you can see that beyond using a different type of style or extending thinking, it has the ability to search the web, drive, Gmail, calendars, and you can see here Canva, Notion, Zapier Moxy OS brain. What does that mean? Well, if you go to add connectors you will see a number of different web connectors as well as desktop extensions. Now if you do have the Claude for desktop, you will open up the ability to use additional MCP connectors, and that may be another video that we’ll put together beyond this one. But you can see it operates similarly with some more advanced capabilities here.

For example, if you use Asana, you could very quickly connect your Asana account. If you use Canva, you can connect your Canva account and you can interact and engage with information that is in one of these platforms. In another video we’ve done, we showed how to use the Gmail integration to get set up very quickly. As I mentioned, Google Drive, popular tools, HubSpot here. If you use that for your CRM, then that might be useful for you. And so I would encourage you to check out what connectors Claude now has natively on the web as well as the desktop.

What I found is a really useful way to get more out of Claude, or really any interface that I want to be able to connect to, is an MCP that has all the tools that I already want to use, is building a brain inside of Zapier and then connecting that with, in this case, Claude. I’m going to show you how. I’m here in Zapier. If you go to zapier.com/mcp, that’ll take you directly to this page. And if you want to learn more about model context protocol, I’ll link this as well below the video at Anthropic. I have a great breakdown of what MCP is.

When you log in, I’m going to open up my Zapier MCP dashboard, which has on the left-hand side a number of different servers. Now, the one that we just saw inside of my Claude account was my Claude MCP server, which you can see right here. I haven’t been actively using the Salesforce integration since I set it up, and it requires me to continue finishing setting up. But you can see as I scroll down, Firecrawl is another MCP service that I did set up. You can see Google Drive. You can see Google Docs. You can see Slack. You can see Notion. Some of these may be natively integrated with Claude right now. Some of these maybe not. And so you can use something like a Claude MCP server inside of Zapier to set up specific tools that you want to add. We’ve seen some of these natively inside of Claude and more are getting added natively every week it seems.

And when I scroll down here and want to look, you can see I can pull up Zoom, Zendesk, Asana, Salesforce. And if you use something like GoHighLevel, you also have a lead connector MCP. So now, with a matter of setting up this lead connector and connecting my account, I will then be able to engage with contacts and update things inside of my GoHighLevel CRM, for example. And that’s just one MCP server that right now, at least from what I’ve seen, is not natively built inside of the Claude connectors, but it is something that if you go through Zapier’s MCP server and make your own, you can build a whole entire setup for all the different tools that you use, and maybe tools for different projects, but it is set up to connect directly with your Claude integration.

And so Zapier has one for Claude. This is blurred out, but basically you just copy your URL. How to set up a Claude Zapier connector right here. It is simple to get started. And depending on how many tools you’re actually using in your workflow is going to vary with how many connecting tools you’re going to want to add to your server. There’s no need to put unnecessary tools in there. It may cause it to be slower than ideal.

And at this time, sometimes I’m still having issues with actually sending a Slack message back. But I am able to get Slack messages and summaries from my Slack channel that are in real time using this same interface between Claude and Zapier. And I’ll show you a quick example right now what I mean by that.

When I’m in my Claude account, this is just a conversation from today. I started the conversation. I said, “Check my morning Slack messages. Any updates from Franco, who’s our teammate?” And it’s checking it. It went through the thought process for finding different messages. We were running into just needing to be in sync with authentication, and so that was what got mentioned here. So there are a few other things inside of this thread. One of them was searching for an email that was causing the technical issue that we were running into on Slack, reaching out to the company. I wasn’t able to actually send the email directly from my Claude interface. But when I went to check my Gmail, the email is there in draft, and so I would just send it directly from there.

Now through the Zapier MCP integration server that I set up, I was able to talk with the Slack server that, as of right now, I haven’t seen the native integration on the web version of Claude. And so that would be the way that I can connect that specific resource and communication tool inside of my Claude account, bring everything together inside of one interface, and then continue on my workflow from there.

Hope you found that useful. Like, subscribe, and share if you did.