Connectors & MCP — how Claude reaches your real tools. For everyone on Claude.ai or Cowork.
60 minutes, 3 parts. Click any line to jump to that section.
MCP in plain terms — the kitchen Claude cooks in. Read vs. act. Your three connectors.
Answer Finder, Meeting Prep, and a Salesforce churn alert — each with a flow chart.
Why everything lives in Notion, the flywheel that makes the tools smarter — and what to do this week.
It stocks the kitchen Claude cooks in.
Picture an outside system — Notion, your email and calendar, Slack — as a kitchen full of ingredients and equipment. A connector hands Claude the keys: it can walk in, see what's there, and cook with it. The open standard behind it is called MCP (Model Context Protocol).
The kitchen analogy (from Anthropic's skills guide): "MCP is the professional kitchen — the tools, ingredients and equipment." It's everything Claude can work with. MCP is what Claude can do.
You don't install anything. You just turn a connector on — and the kitchen is stocked. (The recipe — the skill — joins in a moment.)
"Can't Claude just Google it?" — only for things that live on the public web. Your real work sits behind your login, in your own tools. That's the gap connectors close.
Under the hood a connector hands Claude a set of tools — things it can do in that kitchen. They split into two kinds, and the difference is everything when you decide how much to trust it: reading is checking the pantry; acting is cooking and serving.
Claude looks, nothing changes.
Worst case: a wrong answer. Easy to demo, hard to break.
Claude changes something in the real world.
Worst case: a real message goes out. Default to draft, confirm before send.
A connector is only as good as the data behind it. Here's what each of yours actually holds — match the question to the right tool.
The knowledge base. Policies, decision logs, meeting notes, docs, specs. The canonical, official answer lives here.
"What's our policy on…", "what did we decide…"
Outlook email & calendar, Word/Excel, SharePoint files. External context, commitments, meetings, documents.
"What's on my calendar…", "summarise this thread…"
Channels and threads. The latest, informal picture — decisions in passing, questions, who's on what. May be superseded.
"Catch me up on…", "what was decided in…"
Part 1 stocked the kitchen — the connector. A skill is the recipe: the steps that turn those ingredients into a dish, made your way every time. MCP is what Claude can do; the skill is how it should do it. Chain them, and a teammate just orders dinner.
Every workflow today is the same shape — read it left to right:
One tool, then two, then three — chained into something you'd actually use.
Each workflow is drawn as a chain of boxes, left to right. The colour of the top edge tells you what each box is.
The plain-English ask that starts it.
The recipe that scopes the task and orchestrates the rest.
A connector pulling data. Safe, reversible.
The thinking step — and your checkpoint: review and talk through the data here before anything acts.
A connector changing the world. Drafts & confirms first.
What you get back — the answer or artifact.
One question, searched across all three tools at once. It interviews you to pin down the ask, finds the answer with linked sources, and tells you who to ask for more.
Before a meeting, it pulls the event and attendees from your calendar, the background from Notion, and the recent chatter from Slack — and hands back a one-page brief.
The full loop: read the churn signals, rank the at-risk accounts, then act — DM each owner on Slack and archive a timestamped report to Notion.
disable-model-invocation), drafts everything for you to confirm first, and stamps the report with the query-execution time so every run is auditable.
Any of these workflows can run on a schedule — the churn alert every Monday at 9am, a digest every Friday. Three ways to automate, from no-setup to full control. Pick by how technical you want to get.
The desktop app's built-in scheduler. Runs on your subscription — connectors already authed, skill already installed, nothing to re-plumb. Recurring (cron), one-time, or ad-hoc manual trigger.
Caveat: app must be open, runs on your machine, ~few-min dispatch delay.
Headless claude -p fired by your OS scheduler (cron / launchd / Task Scheduler), on your subscription. You re-plumb the MCP servers + skill config inside Claude Code.
Caveat: still needs your machine on.
Full control, runs server-side without your laptop — cron, GitHub Actions, the cloud. The most plumbing, but truly hands-off once it's live.
Billing: subscription credit covers it from Jun 15, 2026; before that, API pay-as-you-go.
A connector is only as smart as what's written down.
Answer Finder, Meeting Prep, the churn report — they all read from Notion. The more we capture there, the smarter every one of them gets. That's a flywheel, and it only spins if we feed it.
If it isn't written, it didn't happen. Every decision and discussion gets captured — and recorded & transcribed via Notion's meeting notes.
One company-wide, queryable source of truth. If you want it findable later, it goes in Notion.
Quick discussions and unblocking. The moment a thread becomes a decision, promote it into Notion.
Every new tool is another place knowledge hides. Fewer sources = more trackable, more searchable, more controllable.
A connector gives Claude hands in your real tools. Turn one on and Claude can read — and act on — Notion, your inbox, Slack. No copy-paste.
Skills are the recipes that make connectors useful — and precise. MCP is what Claude can do; the skill is how it should — the same precise result, every time.
Read freely; act on purpose. Reading is safe. Anything that sends or writes should be a draft you confirm. That one rule keeps you out of trouble.
The flywheel runs on Notion. The tools are only as smart as what's written down. Capture decisions, and every workflow gets better for everyone.
Give Claude something to reach for.
#ai-office-hours on Slack