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Free resourceConnectors: what plugs into your business.
AI is only as useful as what it can reach. A connector is what lets it work inside the tools you already run — your inbox, your docs, your CRM, your payments. Here's what connects to what, organized by the part of the business it actually runs.
First: what a connector actually is
On its own, an AI assistant can only talk. It can't look at your calendar, read your CRM, or send an email — it has no hands. A connector gives it hands.
The standard behind this is called MCP (Model Context Protocol). You don't need to understand the protocol any more than you need to understand SMTP to send email. What matters is the shape of it: a connector sits between the AI and a service you already pay for, and turns that service's actions into things the AI can do on your behalf — read the page, send the message, pull the report.
The practical test for whether a connector is worth setting up: is there a task you do in that tool every week that you'd hand to an assistant if you had one? If yes, connect it. If no, skip it — a connected tool you never delegate to is just another thing to maintain.
Finding customers
The research-and-list-building work that eats an afternoon and produces a spreadsheet.
Clay Lead gen
Clay pulls from 150+ data providers to research and enrich contacts and companies. Connected, you can run prospecting from a conversation instead of building tables by hand.
- Ask it: find 40 companies matching this profile and enrich them with contact details
- Ask it: check which of these leads have changed jobs since last quarter
- Ask it: pull the list, then draft a first-touch message for each one
Talking to people
Email and messaging — the highest-volume, lowest-leverage work most solo operators do.
Gmail Email
Read, draft, search, and send. The most useful first connector for most people, because email is where the backlog lives.
- Ask it: summarize everything I haven't replied to from this week
- Ask it: draft a reply to this thread in my voice, don't send it
Slack Team comms
For anyone working with a team, contractors, or a client channel. Catch up on a channel without scrolling it.
- Ask it: what decisions were made in this channel while I was away?
- Ask it: post the weekly update to #general once I approve it
iMessage Notifications
Less about reading messages, more about getting told when something finishes. Useful when work runs in the background and you've walked away from the desk.
- Ask it: text me when the research run is done
Documents and knowledge
Where what you know is written down — and where it goes stale if nobody maintains it.
Notion Docs & planning
Read and write pages and databases. If you run a content calendar, a client tracker, or an SOP library in Notion, this is the connector that lets AI maintain it rather than you.
- Ask it: add this week's ideas to the content calendar with dates
- Ask it: turn this messy call transcript into a clean SOP page
Google Drive Files
Reach documents and spreadsheets where they already live, instead of downloading and re-uploading them.
- Ask it: read last month's numbers and write the summary
- Ask it: find every doc that mentions this client
Time and scheduling
The part of the business that quietly decides what actually gets built.
Google Calendar Scheduling
Read availability, create events, and reason about where your week actually went.
- Ask it: where did my time go last week, by category?
- Ask it: find me three two-hour blocks for deep work next week
Getting paid
Revenue questions you'd otherwise answer by exporting a CSV and building a pivot table.
Stripe Payments
Query payments, customers, and subscriptions. Most useful for the monthly questions you keep re-answering by hand.
- Ask it: what's my revenue this month versus last, and what changed?
- Ask it: which subscriptions failed to renew, and when?
Give this one read-only access unless you have a specific reason not to. It touches money.
Version history
Not just for developers — it's the undo button for everything you build.
GitHub Safety net
Worth knowing even if you never write code. If your prompts, instructions, and workflows live in version control, a bad change is a rollback instead of a rebuild. That's the whole reason to care.
- Ask it: what changed in my setup last week?
- Ask it: roll this back to how it was on Friday
How to actually connect one
Setup is per-tool, but the shape is always the same:
- See what's connected. Run
/mcpin a session to list current connectors and add new ones. - Authorize the service. You'll sign in the same way you would on any site granting access to another app.
- Give it the narrowest access that works. Read-only first. Widen it later, once you've watched it behave.
- Test on something reversible. Ask it to draft before you let it send.
Two honest limits. Connectors don't remove your judgment — an AI with access to your inbox can still send the wrong email confidently. Keep approval on anything outward-facing until you trust the pattern.
And a technical one worth knowing: background helper agents can't reach connectors directly. The main session handles those calls, so design work with the main session as the one holding the keys.
If you want to go further
Connectors are the useful layer for most people. Underneath them sits a more technical set of tools, worth knowing only once connectors are earning their keep:
Project memory
A file that gives the AI standing context about your business, so you stop re-explaining yourself every session.
Saved procedures
Turn a repeated set of instructions into a single command you can run. Anything you've pasted more than three times belongs here.
Automatic rules
Actions that fire on their own — before or after the AI does something. This is how you enforce "always do this" and "never do that."
Parallel helpers
Separate sessions that work at the same time, so research, writing, and review happen simultaneously instead of one after another.
Ecosystem details last verified 2026-07-03. Connector availability and setup steps change quickly — check the current docs for the tool you're connecting.
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