230 | Unlocking AI’s Full Potential with MCP Connectors (Without a Line of Code) with Matt Martin

0:00Hello, and welcome to the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage your AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have a fascinating episode and topic for you today. So I'm going to start with a question. What is the most important resource you have as yourself, as a head of a company or a business? Well, some would say money, some other would think human capital, but the reality is there's only one resource that we cannot get more of, and that is time, which basically means the better you are with time management, either for yourself or for other people in your company, you can achieve a lot more without paying for additional resources.

0:44Now, there's ample of research showing that most of us people and business managers and CEOs of large companies and regardless of our positions are usually pretty bad at time management, which is really sad. We get distracted very easily. We don't necessarily have agendas for things and so Now, the good news is that AI can be an incredible asset helping us with managing our time better. So if you feel that you can benefit from better time management, you will find incredible value in this episode. Now, as always, we're going to show you exactly how to do this from a very practical perspective.

1:22So by the end of the episode, you will have the exact tools, prompts, steps, processes that you need to use and implement in order to better manage your time with the assistance of AI tools. By the way, if you don't think you need help with time management, please drop me a note and tell me how you do this because you're probably the best time manager in the world. I've never met a person who has been really effective with managing their time. But now to our topic. Our guest today, Matt Martin, is the co-founder and the CEO of Clockwise, which is a company that has developed software products to help people better manage their time.

1:56Now, this name by itself is brilliant, calling the company Clockwise for a product that actually helps you manage your time. But in addition to coming up with great names, he's also extremely knowledgeable in how to better manage our time using software applications because he has been doing this for nine years now. So Clockwise has been around way before the AI craze, and now it's obviously upgraded a lot of what it's doing with AI capabilities in connection with AI tools that we use in our day-to-day. So in this episode, Matt is going to teach us exactly how to use connectors, such as calendar connectors, connectors, and email connectors, as well as the clockwise software into large language models, such as Cloud and ChatUPT, using either the built-in connectors in them or using MCP connectors, which by the way, just knowing these things, how to use connectors and how to connect MCP servers are incredibly powerful skills that are worth learning regardless of the time management benefit.

2:55But we're also going to go over specific use cases that can dramatically improve your time management using AI in connection with these tools. And since this is extremely valuable, and I'm sure you would agree, I am really excited to welcome Matt to the show. Matt, welcome to Leveraging AI. Hi.

3:17In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

3:58Isar, what a great intro. Thanks so much for having me on. And this is a topic, obviously, that's near and dear to my heart. Two things off the jump, though. So one is, if anybody out there is responding to Isar's prompt, send them an email. if you don't need help time management. Shoot that my way too, I'd love to hear. And second is, I wish I were as good at naming as Clockwise would indicate. I have to give thanks to my co-founder for that one. I am so bad with names. One of the toughest thing in computer science, naming things. Yeah, 100%. But anyways, I'm really glad we're here. I really think it's a very, very important topic, right?

4:36I didn't say that in a joke. It's literally the only asset we cannot get more of. There are multiple books on how to manage our time better. There's different systems, processes, and so on. But if we can connect it to tools that we're using anyway in our day-to-day, then it's a huge benefit. So now the stage is yours. Show us the magic and show us how we can do this better. Let's do it. I love the format of this where we just kind of get in and get dirty to show people exactly how to do this stuff. So let me just share my screen for a moment. I've queued up a few things that I want to take your audience through.

5:12So clockwise, as you noted, we've been doing this for a while. And one of the advantages we have is we have a massive corpus of data. So we connect to some of the best companies on the face of the planet, places like Uber, Netflix, Atlassian, and help power their schedules. And we've taken kind of the brain and hooked it up to a model context protocol server so that you can use it inside a cloud or chat TPT as it were. the first thing though that I'd like to go through is just if you don't connect clockwise you're going to be missing out on some power but there's still tons that you can do in the time management space when it comes to mcp server as time management and I'll give a shout out to this how to geek article if you just google claude managed calendar how to geek you'll find this article.

6:00And Dibbikar, I like this article. It's a little clickbaity, but I like it because he's gone so in-depth with what you can do. And it illustrates both the power of these tools and some of the limitations. So I'm going to just take this prompt and kind of show you a really in-depth usage of Claude and Calendar. Awesome. So scooting over to Claude here, I'm going to run over a couple of things with everyone. If you're not familiar, this is Claude.ai. I'm sure your audience is familiar with that much. I hope so. Yeah. Or else you haven't done your job right, sorry. Yes, exactly. I failed miserably if they don't.

6:42And under here, you have tools. And one of the ones that they have is calendar. I'm going to pause you just for one second. For those of you who are not watching, we're looking at Claude. And at the bottom, at the prom section of Claude, By the way, it's very similar in all the tools. There's these little kind of like toggle buttons, which is basically opens a whole menu. And in that menu, you have multiple things that you can do. One of the segments there is connectors, which are different things you can actually connect to Claude. It's a very similar setup in Chachapiti as well, which we may or may not see afterwards.

7:11And now I'll let you continue from here. By the way, the other thing that we did is Matt took the prompt from that article that he recommended. We're going to put a link to that in the show notes. You can jump straight to that from your phone or your computer or whatever it is that you're listening to the podcast and you'll be able to see the prompt as well. And we're going to read a short snippet out of it afterwards, but continue now that we're seeing the menu with the different connectors. Great. Yes. And good reminder that not everybody's watching this on YouTube. So Claude has, and Chetapiti does as well, the ability to read from your calendar.

7:40So you can connect your Google calendar. Unfortunately, they don't have Outlook yet, but you can read from your Google calendar and it'll be able to suck down that information and give you some insights based off of it. So I have toggled on the Google Calendar connector. You just OAuth into your Google account. And I've copied and pasted the prompt that was provided from the article. And there are a few things here that I'll just run through for the audience. So it's asking for, it's a very highly structured prompt. And I like these kinds. When you see people are really into AI, really into MCP, you see people who give the LM a tremendous amount of guidance on what they want out of it.

8:17And you really do get better results by doing that. And I'll pause you just one second before we dive into the prompt. For those of you who are new to the show or hasn't been listening to all the episodes, what is an MCP? An MCP is basically a USB connector for third-party software into AI tools. So about roughly a year ago, maybe a little less, Anthropic themselves, so the company behind Claude, came up with a new protocol that now everybody's using that basically said, instead of every company in the world now developing connectors of different pieces of software into large language models or agents and so on, what if we develop a standard protocol that once one person or the company itself creates the connector, you can plug it in to your AI environment in three minutes, which again, we're going to see afterwards how to do.

9:05So that became an extremely powerful capability to enhance the abilities of these AI tools, chatbots, agents, and so on, because they can now connect either just as a read-only or as read and write, depending how the MCP connector was developed, with whatever third-party software. In this particular case, your Google Calendar. But this could be, as we'll see, many, many other different things. So closing parentheses, back to you, Matt, to talk about the prompt. Yeah, no, it's a great thing to explain a little bit because MCPs are kind of like plugins. Like you said, they're the USB connector. And as we'll see, the ecosystem is still kind of developing on how exactly to connect them, what the level of support is, but very, very powerful if you want to allow the LLM access to third-party tools.

9:53And so here, the connector is to calendar. And we're just asking for a few different things here. We're asking for our initial calendar overview, time analysis, schedule insights. And then we're going to ask it to help us plan out our week with event details and possibly even make modifications. So having entered that, what's amazing about this is that Claude will use that connector to search all of my calendar events and it'll give me a rundown of the next 30 days of stuff that I have going on. And it'll look like you can get that sort of stuff out of your calendar in, I would argue, a much more consumable fashion than just text.

10:32But what it can do next with all that information is to then identify insights. So some of the patterns that you have, some of the conflicts that you have, when you're busier, when you're lighter, time zone considerations, special attributes. And then the real power is next steps. So now that it's analyzed all that, it can help resolve triple bookings, manage time zone challenges, improve work-life balance. Now, I could dive into this and start to have a conversation with Claude. But one of the limitations about current calendar connectivity, either in Cloud or ChatGPT, is that it's read-only.

11:08So it can't actually, you know, it will tell me things that it thinks it can resolve. But it has some pretty severe limitations. One is that not only is it read-only such that it can't write or schedule anything or move anything. But the other severe limitation, which I don't think people appreciate a lot of the time, is that, you know, If it's trying to help me resolve a double booking, it cannot see the other attendees' calendars. So its insights are going to be limited to just what it sees on my calendar, which is helpful, but it's not everything. But one of the prompts that I do love with just vanilla Claude with Calendar Connected is to send a message to it saying, hey, can you take a peek at my schedule for the next two weeks and find events that I've organized that don't have an agenda?

12:01And what's great about this is that Claude can not only identify that, but then it's very good at helping me construct that agenda if I want to. so it can identify those events. But then, you know, with a little bit of information, it can actually help me, you know, construct that agenda for it. So I want to add two cents to what you said, just to expand on the capabilities of these tools and how these things become a lot more interesting. One of the things that you can build in Cloud and in ChatGPT, it doesn't matter, is repetitive information that has background information to it. So in Cloud, it's called Project.

12:35In ChatGPT, it's called Custom GPTs. And you can create a Cloud project in this particular case that will have the way you craft agendas. So here's the template for agendas. We must have all these different topics. So it needs to say how long is the meeting? Who's going to speak? Who's attending? What's the goal? What are the different things we're going to cover? How much time is for like whatever it is that you want? That will be the standard agenda. The other thing that you can define is what kind of agendas you want for what types of meetings, depending on the people you're meeting with. Like whatever additional information you can provide.

13:05And then the kind of answers you're going to get out of Claude when you ask these kind of questions is going to be, significantly more aligned with what you and your company is expecting to have in those meetings, because we'll follow your rules and guidelines because you placed them in this project before you started the conversation. So just another food for thought and another expansion of what you can do with these kinds of tools. Killer tip, killer tip. And I'm not going to belabor this use case too much, but, you know, we see that there are a variety of meetings that don't have agendas that's identified.

13:33And I could use, you know, we all know how great LMs are at generating text, I could use them to dynamically create that agenda. With a little bit more work, I could also connect either Google Drive or Notion using that same MCP connector to pull out any sort of associated agendas or create them in those areas, which is what I love to do. I'm not going to do that because I actually am going to switch gears here a little bit and show folks exactly how to connect external connector because that's kind of the next step of the process. So let's pop over to a new tab here. And so I have just a fresh Claude instance, Claude.ai, Anthropics chat model.

14:14And here under that same toggle where you have search and tools, which is right underneath the prompt, you can open that and then there's a little plus button at the bottom to add connectors. And this opens up Claude's, well rather Anthropics kind of list of pre-approved connectors. And it's growing all the time. There are some really, really cool things you can do here with things like Canva or Databricks or Fireflies, you know, pull in your recordings. I'm of course going to go to Clockwise and connect Clockwise. And so we're featured here alphabetically. You can connect to Clockwise and I'll just, it'll pop open a new window, sign me into clockwise, and then I'm good to go.

14:56And actually, this is a prompt from a different window. So we'll reset this for a second. And so now, if I open up that same dropdown menu, and this is going to be the case for any connector that you add. And by the way, connectors are just Anthropics friendlier word for an MCP server. I'll say two cents. Yes. You can connect. So there's, I don't know how many Anthropic already have approved. So there's 20, 30 of them, I think-ish, that are tools that you use that most of us use all the time. But you can connect literally any MCP server that is out there by going to the MCP server, getting the code that it needs in order to connect and dropping it into Claude's backend.

15:38It sounds really complex. Watching a YouTube video for about three minutes, you can literally do the process yourself. And if you don't know how to do this, which I'm one of the people who do not know how to do this, I asked Claude to do it for me. I literally dropped the code in Claude. I said, this is what I want to put in your config file. Write the code for me. It will write the code. I will paste it back into the config file. And then it will add another one of these connectors, even if it's not showing up by default in that plus button of approved connectors. So even you have a connector that is not approved, you can still add it in the back and do really, really magical things with this.

16:14But again, closing parentheses again, back to this. So now we're looking at the clockwise connector. Yes. And I love the digression there because there are so many great tools that aren't featured in their connector list. If you, as you're adding tools, you'll see that you can kind of dive one level deeper in this dropdown and you can see all the tools that a specific connector has given you access to. So in MCP world, what a MCP server exposes are a set of tools that give specific abilities to LM. And so the clockwise MCP server, for example, one of the tools that it has is to create a meeting proposal.

16:55That's one of 16 tools. If you connect Notion, one of the tools is going to be create Notion page or read Notion doc. And these specific tools are what give the underlying LLM the ability to add additional powers, additional functionality. A tip that I'll give folks, especially as you're playing in MCP world, as you add additional connectors slash MCP servers, it's best to start playing actively with these toggles. for better or worse, as you add a lot of them, the LM can start to get a little bit bogged down in which tool to call into and get a little bit confused. Especially as you're playing and getting confident with these, it's best to say, you know, if you're using clockwise to switch off calendar search, because those can conflict.

17:44If you're, you know, if you both use Asana and Jira, you know, flip off Asana and use Jira or flip off Jira and use Asana, because these, they can kind of collide and they can also make the LM trip up. Yeah. So to explain two seconds, and it's a great point, you don't call the tool as you're writing the prompt. You're literally writing the prompt in regular English. So if I'll use your Asana and Jira example, if you ask it, oh, look for all the tasks that X, it knows on its own that it has an MCP connector, and then it will use the connector to find the tasks that are assigned to a specific person in a specific date range.

18:18And if there's two tools that do that, it will potentially get confused or get some of it from one, some of it from the other. So you're basically opening yourself to more errors. And I agree with you 100%. If you have things that might be contradicting, just turn the toggle button off on one, work on the other, or vice versa. I've also found, sorry, if you find something that definitely corrects me here, but I've also found that even when you, definitely when you have overlapping domains, it's good to flip them off because, as you said, they can collide. But even if you have non-overlapping domains, I find that it's helpful just to select the tools that I'm working with.

18:55And I don't always remember this, but I find that Claude, ChatGPT, other LMs can get bogged down just the more tools that it has access to, even if they don't conflict. Yeah, it makes sense. Think about it. They got to kind of go through the list of all the different functions in each and every one of the tools with every prompt that you write. You want to minimize that just to let it run smoother. Yeah, I think it's one of the areas that they're still kind of developing the underlying systems. So now that we've done Claude, I'm actually going to switch to ChatGPT. I know ChatGPT, just from a pure numbers perspective, is much more widely used.

19:29Unfortunately, ChatGPT's support for MCP servers is a little bit lagging behind Anthropics. That's being very gentle with OpenAI. Well, look, I know they'll get there. They're obviously building into it more, and it was Anthropics spec. But yeah, it's a little bit disappointing that they don't have it full featured yet. So this is kind of funky. I'm gonna walk people through how to do this and how my annotate button for Zoom is actually in the place that I'm trying to click here. It's annoying. So if you're in ChatGPT, in the bottom left, you'll see your profile and that's where you get to settings.

20:09So you're gonna go into settings and you do need for this in ChatGPT, You need either a chat GPT, I forget what they call their business accounts, either business or enterprise, but you need a business. Yeah, there's, I think, plus, then teams, then enterprise. And I think all three of them will have access to that. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that for, on the individual side, you just need plus. Yeah, plus or what's the, plus or pro. And then on the business side, you need either teams or enterprise. Yep, yep. And I think that, you know, their pricing rubrics are getting more and more complicated.

20:41But I think that's basically everything except free. If you're on the free tier, you won't see this. But otherwise, you should see it. So you go into settings. You go into connectors. So they're also calling MCP service connectors. And you'll see under the connectors tab. So I'm in settings. If you're not following along visually, I'm in settings. And there's a list of connectors that are available. Now, the thing about ChatTBT's connectors is they're search only. And they can't really do much. and we ran into this when we were developing clockwise, they really don't have multiple tools right now.

21:15They just have search. So if I connect Google Drive, it can search through my documents and access them, which is really helpful, but it can't create one. It can't add an update. It's just search. They're obviously moving towards full MCP support because under this, it's so buried. You go into connectors and you have to scroll to the bottom. Make sure you scroll all the way down. It's hidden. You go to advanced settings and then you enable developer mode. which it says is in beta. And this is how you get access to adding a full MCP server. Now, if I go back to that same connectors page and I click create, I can create a custom tool.

21:54And as Isara mentioned earlier, there are so many great MCP servers out. You will have to go find the URL for this. But if you search, for example, clockwise MCP, linear MCP, Atlassian MCP, you'll find the instructions pretty quickly. And so you fill in a few terms here. And what you really need is the MCP URL. And you need to know how to authenticate. Ours happens to be OAuth, not everybody's is. And then you create it. And this is now going to enable the same MCP server access that I had on Cloud's side, except that it's in ChatGPT. Now, I will also note that ChatGPT still has some limitations even in this mode.

22:35First, and somewhat annoyingly, you're going to see a red box to indicate that you're in dev mode. It always freaks me out. I'm like, what did I do wrong? I have to remember that I'm in dev mode. The second is that... Just a second, when Matt's saying a red box, the prompt box just has a red outline instead of the regular black slash gray outline that it has usually. That's right, that's right. And the other thing to note about ChatGPT's implementation is right now, memory is disabled when you're using dev mode. And memory is what stores kind of the past information about your chats in ChatGPT.

23:16I find it to be just insanely, insanely useful. And so this is kind of a blocker for me. I often have to go toggle off dev mode because memory is so helpful in of itself. So I will cop to the fact that I want to show people how to use MCP servers in ChatGPT, but I use it almost exclusively in Cloud right now just because ChatGPT's implementation is so constrained. And we are on the same page. It's extremely annoying that ChatGPT memory is not working. And I don't understand if this is a technical limitation, which doesn't make any sense to me, or a security limitation, which also doesn't make much sense to me.

23:52But that's the situation right now, as you said. Like the memory is not working, like the red circle, whatever. No, I don't care. But not having memory available on both sides. So it doesn't know what happened and he doesn't remember anything new is really annoying. So a little bit of a nerdy digression here. I don't know if you have any insights, but I've been wondering why they're a little bit behind and they have these limitations as well. And I think part of the reason has to be that tool calling has to be part of the model. And so Anthropic developed this back. And so when they were developing Claude and 4.5 Sonnet just came out today, but these models are very good at tool calling.

24:28Whereas I've seen that ChatWD5 isn't quite as good at tool calling. And when you go back into later models, like anything trained off of 4.0, they're just not very good at tool calling. So I wonder if it's model training that they're behind on. Potentially. Okay, let's get into the fun stuff. So we went through setup, which, you know, isn't super fun. But if you can't set it up, you can't do anything. So I wanted to make sure to run through that with everyone. So I'm going to pull up a new window for Cloud AI. Again, this is what I prefer for any time that I'm working with connectors or MCP servers.

25:03I'm going to check that clockwise is connected. So again, opening up that little toggle underneath the search prompt. Clockwise connected, calendar searches disconnected. So the full power clockwise will be in here. And I'm just going to paste in a very simple prompt. Can you find me a time to meet with Junjun, Mike and Casey next week? and these are just three folks that I work with. I'm just using their plain names just like I would with an assistant and I'm going to fire this off and I'm going to note a couple things that gets to brag a little bit. This is about clockwise but it really showcases the advances in MCP server and what tool calling enables is that Claude by itself wouldn't know who Juju, Mike and Casey are but it can use clockwise to search people that I attend meetings with, disambiguate that to find the right people, then it can create in kind of one shot a proposal for times that I might meet with them.