Companies and individuals need to have all of their knowledge base available to their chat, their documents, their tasks, their notions, their github codebase their jira tickets or confluence pages,
Claude Pro and Max (Anthropic’s top-tier offerings) offer more than just higher token limits or speed, they bring Claude Connectors, a transformative leap powered by the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
What Are Claude Connectors & MCP?
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard enabling language models to securely interact with external apps, treating them as real endpoints rather than isolated suggestions. It creates a universal, consistent format for tools to present their capabilities to LLMs.
- Claude’s Connectors use MCP to seamlessly integrate with tools like Google Drive, Gmail, Canva, Asana, Figma, Spotify, Notion, Github, Jira, Confluence, and more. They allow Claude to execute cross-app workflows via a single prompt, without needing to jump between interfaces or copy-paste.
Why It Matters
- End-to-End Automation
Example: “Claude, summarize this Google Drive folder, draft a proposal, schedule a review, and create the presentation in Canva.” Claude handles all steps in one thread. - Agentic Capabilities
Claude transitions from generating responses to becoming an active collaborator, optimizing workflows across domains, and even allows you to update the data, your data, at source. - Superior Context Handling
With up to 200,000 up-token windows, Claude retains more context, delivering smoother conversation flow and less hallucination.
Best Connectors & Workflows to Leverage
Top Connectors via Claude (MCP-enabled)
- Google Drive & Gmail – Summarize files, draft emails, manage correspondence.
- Calendar – Schedule events, coordinate meeting times.
- Canva & Figma – Create designs and visuals through natural requests.
- Notion – Search across your workspace, fetch specific pages or databases, create and update content.
- Asana – Manage tasks, assign responsibilities.
- Atlassian – Manage tasks, tickets, project timelines and update confluence knowledge base
- Spotify – Control playlists or recommend tracks.
- Chrome (Beta) – Perform browsing and research tasks directly.
- Notes, Calendar, Intercom – Organize thoughts, keep logs, and interact with customer systems.
Workflow 1: Review My Calendar for the Week
Prompt: Summarise my meetings this week please?
Claude: I’ll help you summarize your meetings this week. Let me search your Google Calendar to see what meetings you have scheduled.
Searched calendar events – 16 results
Based on your Google Calendar, here’s a summary of your meetings this week (August 18-24, 2025):
Key Observations:
- You have a mix of business meetings and what appear to be marketplace transactions
- Total potential costs from transactions: €1,285
- Three notable professional meetings: Google careers discussion and AlphaSights connect call
- Several early morning meetings on Friday (starting at 5:15 AM)
- Most meetings are brief (15-30 minutes)
Is there anything specific about these meetings you’d like me to help you prepare for or follow up on?
The conversation continues
Workflow 2: Review mentions of LEGO in my Google Drive
Prompt: Please review my google docs and can you summarise anything related to LEGO?
I’ll search your Google Drive for any documents related to LEGO to provide you with a summary.
Searched for “LEGO sets, LEGO collections, LEGO sales, LEGO inventory, LEGO marketplace” – 3 results
Let me fetch the full content of these LEGO-related documents to provide you with a comprehensive summary.
Fetching files
Let me try a different approach and search for content that might be related to your LEGO business activities:
Searched for “Star Wars LEGO sets, collectibles, marketplace sales, inventory” – 2 results
Let me search for any business or inventory related documents that might contain LEGO information:
Searched for “business inventory, marketplace sales, collection tracking, Facebook marketplace” – 1 result
Based on my search of your Google Drive, I found several LEGO-related documents, though there are some technical issues accessing the full content. Here’s what I can summarize:
LEGO-Related Documents Summary
Key Documents Found:
- “The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars LEGO”
- Created: May 14, 2025
- Last modified: August 21, 2025 (very recently updated!)
- “Navigating the Legal Landscape – Lego Star Wars Book, Blogs, and Social”
- Created: May 17, 2025
- Last modified: August 21, 2025
- This appears to be a legal analysis document about publishing unofficial LEGO Star Wars guides versus blog posts and social media content.
What I Could Extract:
From the legal document, it appears you were working on:
- Publishing Strategy: Research into publishing a blog, social media content, and an ebook titled “Ultimate Guide to Lego Star Wars” on Amazon KDP. The ebook wasn’t possible.
- Legal Considerations: Analysis of intellectual property concerns, trademark issues with LEGO Group and Disney/Lucasfilm on blogs and social media, versus books.
- Platform Challenges: Investigation into Amazon KDP’s policies, particularly their “companion book” rule for international sales, but no issues on a website blog, and youtube, tiktok, instagram, facebooks for creative pieces.
- Risk Assessment: Evaluation of legal hurdles for unofficial guides covering established franchises on various platforms
Connection to Your Calendar:
This aligns perfectly with your recent calendar activities:
- Russell meeting involving multiple Star Wars LEGO sets:
- Mandalorian AT-ST
- Millennium Falcon – The Force Awakens
- Razor Crest
- Yoda
- Vi meeting regarding a “Big collection of LEGO”
Business Implications:
It appears you’re operating a dual strategy:
- Physical Sales: Active marketplace transactions for LEGO collections
- Digital Publishing & Content Creation: Developing guides/content around LEGO, Star Wars, LEGO Museum
As you can see from the above this is the game changer – this level of integration reduces the halluciantion of Claude and ties the responses to all of the data available to me.
Why ChatGPT & Gemini Still Shine
Despite Claude’s progress, ChatGPT (especially GPT‑5 – although let me decide which model I want to use) and Google Gemini each have compelling strengths that keep them relevant.
ChatGPT (GPT-5)
- Advanced architecture: GPT‑5 (including the “Pro” model) uses parallel “thinking-pro” compute, though it lacks audio I/O and image capabilities, which are still handled by GPT‑4o and other models, hence I need to be able to choose.
- Pricing & Efficiency: GPT‑5 is competitively priced, about half the input cost compared to GPT‑4o.
Google Gemini
Embedded access: Gemini tucked into Android, Wear OS, and Workspace means hands-free, cross-device convenience.Use Cases Solved by These Tools
Multimodal prowess: Gemini supports text, image, audio, and video inputs all in one conversation. Its 2.5 Pro variants offer powerful reasoning and a massive context window (up to 1 million tokens).
Deep Google integration:
Built into Android, Wear OS, Pixel devices, and more, providing seamless experiences across your tech ecosystem.
Direct access to Google services like Maps, Calendar, Tasks, Keep, Photos, YouTube – enhancing personalization and automation.
Advancements in agentic AI: Gemini is powering “Gemini for Home,” replacing Google Assistant with richer conversational capabilities, real-time control, and proactive smarts.
Ecosystem Strength: While not as connector-centric as Claude, Gemini executes powerful automations by tapping directly into Google’s ecosystem:
Smart workflows: Plan a night out via Gemini Live, which auto-creates a Calendar event and consults Maps for dining options.
| Tool | Use Case Example |
|---|---|
| Claude + Connectors | Fully automated campaign: Pull metrics from Sheets, draft a campaign plan, design creatives in Canva, and post to a CMS, all within a single conversation. |
| GPT‑5 (ChatGPT) | Rapid ideation, coding help, or text generation with cost-effective reasoning. |
| Gemini | Context-aware assistance: Create reminders, find directions, plan travel, control smart home, all conversationally and across devices. |
Why Has ChatGPT-5 Sandboxed Connectors from its Chat?
ChatGPT‑5 currently lacks native plugin or connector access, likely a deliberate move by OpenAI to:
- Ensure Safety & Control: Prevent uncontrolled external actions during early, advanced model deployment.
- Gradual Rollout: Testing GPT‑5 Pro’s reasoning core first, before adding external integrations.
- Maintain Ecosystem Quality: Waiting to refine plugin architecture and governance before enabling broad connector access.
While not formally confirmed, this cautious stance aligns with how powerful models are usually phased in.
But it is terrible to be able to unlock this power and will cause ChatGPT to fall behind if it doesn’t allow this.
Why Gemini Stays Tightly Coupled with Google
- Built-in Everywhere: Gemini is woven into Android, Wear OS, Pixel, Workspace, Home devices, and AI Studio, creating a seamless, integrated experience.
- Unified Data Access: With permission, Gemini can read Maps, Calendar, Photos, Tasks, making tasks like itinerary building or personalized assistance far richer.
- Syncing Product Strategy: Google’s AI-first approach ensures all its services and hardware evolve together—Gemini is central to that ecosystem vision.
Google, it is painful when I want to act and get told by Gemini that – unfortunately Darren (the personal touch) I don’t integrate with your Notion, or Asana, or Jira and can’t include these in the results.
Conclusion
- Claude Pro/Max with MCP-powered connectors redefines AI from helper to workflow executor. This is the Game Changer – and over the next weeks a lot of my existing work flows will be re-assessed and trialled in Claude Chat. My n8n usage will reduce.
- ChatGPT-5 delivers advanced reasoning, cost-effective compute, and remains a go-to for pure ideation and creative tasks. This has been plugged into my n8n installation and does an amazing job of being my editor for blog posts, or Go-to-market strategy for https://www.redmondsforge.com and https://www.darrenredmond.com
- Gemini thrives within the Google ecosystem, supercharging productivity with deep service integration and multimodal agility – its deep research tasks has enabled me to research and write 6 AI self-published books in Amazon Kindle – something that both ChatGPT and Claude were not as good at doing.
In short, choosing between them depends on your goals:
- Want automation and cross-app orchestration? Go Claude with connectors.
- Need reasoning depth and creativity? ChatGPT-5 excels.
- Crave seamless device-ecosystem experience? Libra… sorry, I meant Gemini.
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