Introduction

So I'm going to be talking about becoming a cloud desktop power user. And we're going to be going deep on connectors, extensions, and MCP servers, which are all kind of the same thing, but they use different terminology for it.

About the speaker

So a little bit about me. That is not me, obviously.

What's wrong with this image, by the way? That would be really amazing if I could code with my monitor flipped around like that.

This is what happens when you use AI sometimes. It just gives you these very weird results.

So I'm... It's actually like a glass monitor because it's actually mirrored, so the person actually would see the... Oh, these are all like reverse text? It's on the wrong side. OK.

Background and experience

Well, I'm a longtime startup guy. Ran a company called Appsembler for about 11 years. It's a B2B, SaaS, edtech company. Get all the acronyms in there.

That was acquired in 2022. These days, I do AI strategy and implementation consulting through my company, JazzCarta. As Nikolai mentioned, I'm an AI hacker at the Sunday Club.

Really awesome. You guys should check it out if you like hacking on cool AI stuff. I also co-organize the AI Tinkers Boston Meetup, which meets every month just in one of these rooms.

And then, like Nicolay, I'm also a mentor for the NC Adventure Lab. And as of this week, I am now a soccer coach, which will become relevant as we get through the presentation.

AI usage trends and insights

Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about high level before we get into the demos.

How many of you are using ChatGPT at your work? OK.

How many of you are using it for personal stuff? OK.

What people actually do with AI assistants

So there's this really detailed paper. called Which Economic Tasks Are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Cloud Conversations.

So basically what they did is they looked at thousands and thousands of cloud conversations to see what people are actually doing with cloud. Like how are they using cloud desktop to get real work done

And you can read this whole paper if you want. It's got a lot of information, a lot of good stats, and data, and all that good stuff.

Key findings from large-scale analysis

But to summarize, what they found is that the highest usage was in software development. Not surprising. Coders are often kind of on the cutting edge of the technology.

So 37% of the tasks were software development tasks, and content creation was accounted for 10%. 1They also found that 57% was augmentative, so this is like enhancing human work, versus 43%, which is more like automating, automative, which is replacing tasks.

And only 4% of occupations show AI usage across 75% of their tasks. So very few of our day-to-day tasks can be wholesale replaced with AI.

The jagged frontier of AI capability

So I was at a talk yesterday by Ethan Mollack. How many of you know Ethan Mollack? Okay, he's kind of a luminary. He's a Professor Wharton and I think he has 500,000 followers on Substack.

So he's a guy to follow if you want to kind of stay up to date on the latest AI stuff. And he gave a talk. mentioning the jagged frontier.

So the idea with the jagged frontier is that AI capabilities vary dramatically across different tasks. So this creates an uneven landscape of what AI can and cannot do.

So AI can be really, really good at writing software. And really, really bad, it may be like, I don't know, planning your wedding or figuring out what the best soccer ball to buy is. I don't know. These are bad examples.

How AI augments different skill levels

The other thing that Ethan talked about is that AI augments human abilities in areas where our skills are weaker while humans complement AIs in areas beyond the frontier. So this is, the idea is that like, Bottom half skilled participants see 43% improvement with AI, whereas the top half skilled participants see 17%. So basically, it helps people who are weaker at their job get a lot better at their job, versus people who are already really skilled at their job are not seeing as much of an improvement, which kind of makes sense.

And then the last thing is that scaling laws, as these models scale in size and training, these capabilities are going to improve, but it's still going to be uneven. across different tasks.

ChatGPT vs Claude: a quick compare

Okay, so just a brief compare and contrast between ChachiBT and Claude. These companies are always leapfrogging each other, right? Like, one week, one will have a cool new feature, and the next week, the other one, and then they'll kind of copy each other.

What I found is that ChatGPT is a great kind of Swiss Army knife. It does a lot of different things.

They have the voice feature, which is really cool. Sometimes I'm driving and I'm just talking to ChatGPT. It's really nice to be able to do that.

It has the real-time browsing capabilities. I found that Cloud has a longer context window, so you can process a lot more stuff, like large documents.

It's better at following complex multi-step instructions and has really good code generation. So if you're doing coding, Claude is excellent for that as well as for debugging.

MCP: the universal interface for AI tools

Okay, now we're gonna get into a little bit of technical stuff. Who knows what MCP is? Does anyone want to give a definition? How would you summarize MCP in one sentence?

Defining MCP in plain language

USB interface, very good. Michael, do you have one? A reliable interface for AI models to talk to a server to get special purpose knowledge to help them answer questions. Okay, a little wordy, but it's on point, it's on point.

So the way that I like to describe it is like the universal interface for AI, or a USB-C for AI assistance, right? So this interface right here, right, USB-C, is now becoming like the universal thing, right? You can plug this into everything, your phone and your computer and your charging and everything, right?

What MCP enables on your desktop and beyond

What MCP does is it allows your chat bots and your AI tools to talk to all these different services out there on the internet, but also services that are running on your local machine. So you can use MCP to clean up your desktop, which if you saw my desktop, you'd know that I need that. You can also use MCP to like read all your text messages and reply to them like draft replies. You can use it to control like Ableton Live if you're a musician or Blender if you're like doing 3D modeling.

You can actually use a chat client to control desktop apps on your computer as well as like talk to HubSpot or Google Calendar or your email or whatever. So it's really kind of reimagining the human to computer interaction. Instead of pointing and clicking around on a website or in an interface, we can now just talk to the computer and it translates natural language, English, into commands that the machine understands.

So this is a

How it works: hosts, servers, and APIs

basic diagram, so this is like ChatGPT or Cloud Desktop.

It talks VMCP to these different servers, so this might be file system access to like look at files on your local computer. Maybe you're talking to GitHub because you want to look up some repos, and that uses the GitHub API. Maybe you're doing a search on Brave, and so you're just using web APIs, and then these are going out and talking to the internet, right, servers on the internet.

So the basic idea is it creates this standardized communication channel between the AI models, right, the hosts, and these external servers and services, right, through a very well-defined protocol. It used to be that if you wanted to talk to some third-party service on the internet using an AI chatbot, you'd have to like talk at the low-level API, right, which is, you know, it just adds a lot more complexity.

Demo 1: From PDF schedule to shareable calendars

Okay, who's ready for some demos?

The problem: antiquated schedules

Okay, so I became a coach this week because none of the other parents volunteered to be a coach. And I was like, my son's not going to be able to play soccer. And it's this very thankless job, right?

Like, if we had to pay professional coaches to coach our kids, like, it would be too expensive. Like, no one would be able to afford it.

So I signed up to be a coach, and then I learned that The technology that the Medford U soccer team uses is very antiquated. And I'm going to show you an example of that right now.

So what do you think when you see this? Yeah, this is like circa 1990 technology, right? It says 2025 in the copyright, but don't believe it, don't believe it. This is like copyright, you know, year 2000 or late 90s.

So all the parents were like, when are the games gonna happen? When are the games gonna happen? And I was like, I don't know, I can't access the schedule. I could not find where the schedule was.

I finally found it, and this is what it looked like. I'm showing a paper to emphasize that this was built in an era where paper ruled the world.

This is the digital version. This is what it looks like.

I can't get rid of this. Go away. There we go.

So that's what the schedule looks like. Let me make it a little bit bigger so you can see it. So it's like a basic table with the time, the location, It's kind of crude.

I told all the parents, all right, print out this PDF, put it on your refrigerator. But the problem is sometimes you're on the go. You don't always carry your refrigerator around with you. Maybe you want to have this just on your Google Calendar, or you want to have it on your phone or whatever.

Goal: turn unstructured PDFs into structured data

So I'm going to show. a pretty common business task. You have some unstructured file, a PDF document, and you want to get that in a structured format.

Step 1: Convert PDF to CSV

So I'm going to show how we can use Cloud Desktop to do that. So we're going to start a new chat. Let me make this a little bit bigger so you can see what I'm doing.

And I'm going to say, so first what I'm going to do is I'm going to give it access to that file. So it lives in my Downloads folder. And these are all the files I've had to consume in the last week, just to coach my sons.

OK, so this is the schedule, right? So I'm going to give it that context. I'm giving this PDF.

I'm going to say, please convert this PDF file into a structured CSV file. That's all I'm going to give it for now. Let's just see how it does with that.

Uh-oh. I've been using Claude so much today, I think I might have hit some kind of daily limit. This might make for a very short demo.

Yeah, for this task, I do not need Opus. We're not doing a lot of thinking here. Okay, it is thinking though, gathering my thoughts.

Okay, I'll help you convert the PDF file. Oh, did it lose the file when I changed the model? That's weird.

Okay, here's the file. Oh, no, okay. All right, we're gonna have to go back in the time machine here.

Because I'm on the max plan. You'd think if you're paying $200 a month, you should get more than a few hours of conversation with Claude. But she's expensive.

So all right, we're going to go back in time. And I'm going to show you what I did earlier today. So this was basically my query.

We're not going to be able to do this in real time because I'm having issues. So basically what I did is I gave it the file. Let me go back to the very top, TPD top.

Yeah, convert this PDF soccer games in a CSV file. So it created this CSV, which I then downloaded onto my computer to confirm that it was in a good format.

Step 2: Enrich with locations via Excel MCP

And then I said, use the Excel MCP to add another column location with a link to the field's location on Google Maps. Because the first thing the parents are going to say is, how do I get to the location? Where's the game happening? So I want to just give them like, here's a Google Map. Go right here.

So is there a question? Yeah, so what I did is I just said, Use the Excel MCP to add another column with the link to the field's location on Google Maps.

How did you discover the Excel MCP? Ah, yes. That is where we're getting into the power user stuff.

Discovering and enabling connectors

So what you can do in Cloud is it has these things called connectors. And you can see I've connected my Google Drive, my Gmail, my Google Calendar. I've connected my GitHub account. my HubSpot account, my Linear account, my Notion account.

Then I have Airbnb search MCPs. Here's the Excel one right here. And these are all the different things that Claude has access to now.

How many of you guys have seen The Matrix? You know that scene when he says, I know Kung Fu? This is like you're giving Claude the ability to do Kung Fu. You're just like, drop this Excel MCP thing in here, and now it knows Excel. I know Excel.

And now it can basically do everything that you could do in an Excel, but it can do it programmatically just by asking it questions. Just be like, hey, go make an Excel file for me using this data. And that's exactly what I did in this instruction is I basically just said, hey, go make an Excel file. And it uses that Excel MCP file to take the CSV file and convert it into an Excel file and format it.

And I wish I could show you guys this in real time. Maybe if I had another cloud account, I could do it.

Step 3: Format in Sheets and create links

So here it's reading from the Excel file. It's getting workbook data. Here it's creating the spreadsheet. It's modifying some sheet values. And it just does all this stuff in a minute or two.

And now you have, actually this one I was telling it to go make a Google Sheet. 1So it took the PDF file, it converted to CSV, and then it converted the CSV to Excel, and then it converted the Excel file to this Google Sheet. So now I have, if I wanted to share this with the parents, here's when all the games are happening, where they're happening.

Here's the link to the Google map. You don't know where we're playing. It's at this, okay.

So what we're, demonstrating here is that's something that, you know, probably would have taken you several hours to like manually copy paste stuff out of a PDF in Excel.

Now, granted, this is only like five games, right? So it's not like a lot of data, but imagine this, if this has been like 200 games, like I'm doing this for the whole districts, you know, like the whole league, that would have been a lot of work to do. And so the AI is just reducing the time for me to go from a raw, unstructured piece of content, a document, into a structured Excel file and Google Sheet.

Step 4: Generate ICS and populate Google Calendar

Now, the other thing I wanted to do is I wanted to get this in my calendar. So I told it to convert this into an iCal, like ICS file. And it was able to convert to ICS.

But then what it ended up doing is using the the Google Workspace. So I also attached, if you guys can see down here, I have this Google Workspace MCP. So this gives you pretty much anything you can do on Google, you can do with the Google Workspace MCP.

So I can create and delete events in Google Calendar. I can modify spreadsheets. I can read emails. modify slides. I can create tasks in Google Tasks. I can do searches just by connecting my Cloud account to my Google account.

So using that, I was able to then create events in a Google Calendar. And I'll show you guys what that looks like. So I'll hop over here.

If I turn on my So you can see, you guys are seeing all my personal, yeah, so here's one of the games, right?

Medford versus Westford, 10, 30, 12, and it has the Google map link. So I can just click, I'm on the go and I need to, how do I get to the game? And I can just open up my Google calendar, click on the maps link and I'm ready to go.

Demo 2: Operating across business tools with MCP

Okay, any questions on this use case before I move on to the next one?

Connecting GitHub, WhatsApp, Calendar, and more

Okay, so there's a lot of business tools that you can connect. One of the ones

that I use a lot is GitHub. So I can, for example, search GitHub for different repositories. I can say, search GitHub for any better soccer team management tools.

Because I'm finding that the ones that are out. OK, this might not work, because I think I've exhausted my cloud. Yeah, I might not be able to do any actual real-time demos today.

This is what happens when you're so busy during the week doing all the training to get your soccer coach certification that you don't have time to prepare your presentation until the day of, and then you've exhausted all your Claude credits.

Okay, this might not actually work. This will exceed your okay, so I could maybe just start a new chat see Let's see if it if it's smart enough to use so if I click on this little thing here You can see these are all the different

kung-fus that I've given Claude, right? I can control Spotify. I can control WhatsApp.

Triage messages and plan your day

I can search through my WhatsApp conversations and ask it like, who do I need to get back to? I don't know about you guys, but I get like hundreds of WhatsApp messages every day. And with this, I can now, if Claude wasn't crapping out on me, I could, let me go back to one that I already did. Yeah, so I asked, what recent conversations in WhatsApp do I need to reply to?

No way. And it checks, and it listed all my messages. It queries it, and then it says, OK, Serge sent you a Zoom link for tomorrow morning, 7.45, information about the INSEAD meeting.

It doesn't know who that person is. It's 617 area code. Who doesn't go to Coldplay concerts? I don't know who that's from.

And then there's some group chats that maybe might need my input. I also asked it this question, I said, what's on my calendar for today? So it checked my calendar, it found 17 results, and it gives me basically like a little overview of what I've got going on today.

Anyone, any birthdays that I should reach out to people And then I said, what urgent emails do I need to act on related to the soccer game on Saturday? Can you guys tell I'm a little bit nervous about this soccer game? OK, so it read that.

There was that thread there. And then there was this thread here. And then it's like, urgent. Must complete today or tomorrow.

I have to complete the safe sport training. This is required to coach on Saturday. I have to pick up my coaching credentials, I have to complete the Cori application, I have to complete the CDC concussion training, and then I get to go to the game at 2 p.m. on Saturday at Conway Field.

I also have to get my two assistant coaches set up on the Game Changer app. And then it gives me like this bottom line, you know, this is what you got to do for today.

From emails to actionable tasks

I also use this tool called Sansama for managing tasks. And it basically gives you kind of like a way to do your daily planning. And it can pull from GitHub tasks that have been assigned to you, Todoist, your Gmail, your Notion.

And now I've got this connected to Cloud Code. So I can basically like... you know, ask it to get any tasks that I have.

And so it told me that I have to build my imperfect produce box. It's gonna take 15 minutes to do that.

So this is a way that you can sort of take your, emails that are coming in, and then you can convert those emails into tasks that go on your to-do list manager, all just within this chat interface. I don't have to point and click and add this task here and that task here.

I can just use the chat interface and let it kind of translate my natural language into actual tasks that go on my calendar, or I can have it draft emails for me if I want to have it send out emails to people. If you guys use HubSpot, you can also connect it to HubSpot, ask it, like, show me recent deals that I've got going on.

Automating workflows with n8n

Nikolai was showing N8n earlier. You can also connect Cloud Desktop to N8n, and I happen to have an N8n server running here, and these are all my different workflows that I've got set up, right?

So I have, like, These are just a lot of tests in here.

So then I can ask Claude, hey, show me any workflows that I have running. And it's like, OK, these are your active workflows. These are your inactive workflows.

These are different email groups. These are different email calendar automations.

And what's cool about this is I can give it a document, like a business process document, a Word file, a Google Doc, whatever, and I can say, go generate this business process in N8n. And these are the different services. I have HubSpot, I have Gmail, I have Google Calendar, I have whatever.

And Cloud Desktop, using the N8n MCP server that I've got installed here, this one here, it's able to actually generate workflows in NNN programmatically just by natural language. I can just chat to it and it'll go out and generate these workflows on the fly.

Going further with MCP servers

So you can do some really, really powerful stuff with these MCP servers and I'm probably out of time. So I want to just mention,

Exploring the MCP ecosystem

If you're curious about knowing what you can do with MCP, I encourage you to take a screenshot of this page here. Or I don't know if the slides are going to be published later. But these are hundreds, literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of MCP servers that you can use to get either ChatGPT or Cloud Desktop to talk to basically any tool you can imagine.

There's probably an MCP server. And if there's not, there's even MCP servers that will build MCP servers. So you could just say, hey, I need an MCP server to talk to this service that I use.

If it doesn’t exist, generate it

I play pickleball. There's a pickleball sign up scheduling thing. I could probably just tell it, hey, go make an MCP server for this pickleball site. And it would allow me to book pickleball sessions without me having to point and click on their awful interface.

All right. That's my LinkedIn if you want to connect with me.

Q&A

And do we have time for questions? Yeah. All right. Any questions? Yep.

Do you have an MCP server for job applications? Job applications? Yeah. Oh, like for applying for jobs?

Yeah. That's pretty good. I think there should be some. There probably are some. Yeah.

Let's just take a little peek here. They exist, but we just get generic slop. Yeah, so if we do job.

So this is retrieving and filtering job listings based on time period. So it's not submitting your, well, actually, I just remembered I have. . I just remembered I have something called the PDF Filler.

And this thing will actually fill out PDF forms for you. So let's say you've got to fill out your IRS. It's tax time. You can just give it the forms, give it all your information, and say, go fill out my taxes.

Here's all my information. And it'll actually go fill out the PDF form using this MCP PDF Filler. I've tried it and it works, not on my taxes, but I probably wouldn't trust the AI to do my taxes, but maybe it's a first draft, you know, before you.

Okay, question?

Managing many tools and avoiding confusion

You have a lot of MCPs and each MCP probably has a lot of tools in there. Yeah. Have you had any negative experience with having so many tools in there?

Yes, so when I asked, Claude, to show me recent deals in HubSpot, it tried to use the QuickBooks tool. I don't know why, but somehow it equated me asking about HubSpot with wanting my financials in QuickBooks.

So yes, sometimes it gets confused, and you just have to tell it, no, really, don't. This was my question.

You're absolutely right. I apologize for the confusion. I incorrectly tried to use the QuickBooks. I love how it's so apologetic all the time.

Why choose Google Workspace MCP over single connectors

What is it in the Google Workspace MCP that made you prefer that over the Google Calendar connector? Yeah, I think I was hoping to be able to actually not just look at events and add new events, but actually be able to create new calendars. Because I wanted to create a new soccer schedule and then be able to import an iCal file into it. And I think the Google Workspace one is just a lot richer.

It just has a lot more capability than the ones that come with Cloud, like these basic ones. Yeah, so these are like the built-in connectors, right? Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar.

And then you can add these. Like this file system one can actually do stuff on your computer. Like you can tell it, go clean up my desktop. And it'll try to move stuff into folders for you.

Yeah, it's a little bit risky. There's also a Slack one, so you can pretend you're working and have your AI responding to messages for you on Slack. Yeah, so I encourage you all to just play around with this stuff.

Yeah, cool. We'll just pull out your ribbon on the edge.

Directories and examples

Like I said, there are literally hundreds of these MCP servers. This is just one of the many directories.

There's voice stuff, there's weather, there's Pac-Man, there's... Here's another one. This is another list, right?

Any other questions?

Fun experiment: Minecraft via MCP

One of the coolest MCP servers I ever made was a Minecraft MCP server so I can finally beat my son in build battles because he just builds these amazing things.

And I was like, I need something, I need something. So I employed Gen AI to help me build pyramids and things like that.

So I just prompt Cloud Desktop or whatever, go build this thing in Minecraft. And then it uses the HTTP server that you can run in a Minecraft server to actually build stuff. inside it programmatically.

All right.

Conclusion

Well, thank you all.

I'll be around.