How to Automate a Daily Brief with Claude and Zapier (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Cloud is about to get access to every app you use, which means it can actually do work for you, not just talk about it. So to prove it in today's video, you'll learn how to build a daily briefing for your work life that connects to your calendar and your email. And you don't need to be technical to do it. I'm David DeWinter. I've partnered with Zapier to make this possible. So head to the link below and follow along. And if you're not comfortable in a terminal, stick around. I'll show you how to do this from the desktop too. Now, most AI tutorials tell you to use MCP to connect your agent to apps. And while it works, MCP is like a menu. Someone builds a set of actions like send a message or read a calendar event, and your agent picks from the list. If what you need isn't on the menu, you're stuck. The Zapier SDK, on the other hand, gives your agent the full kitchen. Instead of picking from prebuilt actions, your agent gets access to the full API, which means it can read, write, search, filter, and chain operations together. So let's get this SDK installed. I'm gonna show you first in Cloud Code and then in Cloud Cowork. If you don't have Cloud Code yet, check out our tutorial in the top right. First, navigate to an empty directory. I've got this temp zapier-sdk folder here. Then launch Cloud Code. I use this skip permissions option here. If you're not comfortable with that, feel free to skip it. Now, that link I dropped in the description takes you to the Zapier SDK docs. Go ahead and scroll down until you see this section on getting started. You're actually going to install this using a prompt, so click the copy button in the top right corner of that prompt. And take note that while we're setting this up in Cloud Code, you can really use any AI coding agent like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, et cetera. So now back in Cloud Code, paste those setup instructions that you just copied. The prompt takes about a minute in total, but it handles everything. It installs the SDK, sets up the CLI tools, and teaches you how to connect to your first app. About halfway through, it'll ask you to log in with your Zapier account. If you don't have an account, this is a good time to create one. As of filming, the SDK is an open beta, which means that it's free. Back in Cloud Code, you'll see your active list of app connections, unless, like me, you don't have any, in which case you'll see this. To add a connection, you can click this link. Hold the Control key down or Command on Mac and then click it to open it. You'll arrive on this page here. Click Add Connection. We'll add two apps today. The first is your calendar. If you use Google Calendar, you can search for Google Calendar. If you use Outlook, search for that instead. Once you select your app, click Add Connection and follow the prompts. When you're done, you'll see your app appear in the list like this. And now follow the same steps to add a connection to your email. When you're done, you should have two connections here. Head back into Cloud and then ask it to verify that it sees the new connections. You should see something like this, which means your email and your calendar are connected. Now, let's make our search simple and make sure the connections actually work. So here's something basic. Let's just ask Cloud, what's on my calendar today? Now it knows to use the Zapier SDK to access your calendar. One of the great things about agents is if they get stuck like they did here with me, they'll keep trying workarounds until they get to the goal that you want or they'll check in with you. So hopefully you should see the calendar events on your calendar today at the end. Now let's do something with your email. So let's say you've had a lot of emails in the past two days. And if you don't wanna type that out, go down to the resources section in the description. There's a guide there that has all the prompts we'll run today. Two prompts and Cloud has eyes on your email and calendar. But this isn't just about those two apps. Zapier connects to almost 10,000, including Slack, HubSpot, Notion, and pretty much whatever you use. And you can combine them too. So you can pull your meetings from the day, cross-reference emails from each attendee, and you'll be ready before your first call. Let's go build that daily briefing right now. Now this prompt is long, so copy it from the resource guide in the description. And in case you're just here to enjoy the show, here's what that prompt looks like. First, I'm asking for a daily brief with three sections, meetings, emails, and newsletters. Each section has its own header, and each meeting, email, or newsletter has some specific context that I want to see. Let's see what it comes up with for today. About 10 seconds later, and you get the response. It should look like this on your machine too. The meetings list has the name of the meeting, the time, where we're talking, the attendees, the agenda, and my favorite part, the recent context. This context looks for recent emails that might be related to the meeting, which I should be aware of before going in. Scrolling down to important emails, this contains emails I need to respond to, not just marketing newsletters. A cool feature beyond the summary is that there's a link to the original email in case I want to dive deeper. Now, sometimes when I tested this prompt, this link didn't show up, so if that happened to you, check out the resource guide for a fix. Speaking of newsletters, there's a reason I subscribe to them, and they show up here under the recent news section. I don't have time to read every newsletter, but this daily brief helps me figure out which ones I should pay attention to. Now, this is cool for a test run, but chances are you don't want to read this in a terminal, so let's use this prompt to send us an email instead. After a few minutes, Claude sends the email through the SDK and it lands in our inbox, but there's a problem with it. The formatting is completely off. Now, this didn't happen when prepping for this video, but this is a great example that AI is non-deterministic. So to fix this, I'm gonna take a screenshot of this email and then send it into Claude. I'll say the email was sent as text and not HTML, and then use Alt-V to attach that screenshot. It took a little bit longer this time because it found it couldn't send a formatted email using the command line. Because of that, Claude fell back on actually using the SDK to write code to send that email. And now this time in our inbox, we've got our formatted email. That's a working daily brief built entirely through conversation. Now, my challenge to you is to add Slack messages, to-do items, CRM data, anything that Zapier connects to, which would make that more valuable. Zapier CEO, in fact, runs a version of this every morning at 6 a.m., and you can ask Claude to do this for you too. Now, everything I just showed you was in the terminal. If that's not your thing, I've got you covered here in Claude Cowork. Claude Cowork is Anthropx agent on your desktop. It can run tools just like Claude Code, but it's from a visual interface instead. Now, just like with code, head to the link in the description so you reach the Zapier SDK doc page, and then scroll down until you see Getting Started, then click the Copy button next to this prompt. Just like with code, make sure you select a directory to start with, I recommend an empty one, and then paste in the prompt that you just copied. Now, chances are it'll install just fine, but logging in will be a challenge. Cowork uses a special sandbox environment that doesn't work with the normal login flow. To get around this, ask it to use the output of npx zapier-sdk create-client-credentials. After some deliberation, it'll tell you to run this yourself and paste the output back here. So head back to the command prompt and run this command. Type Y to continue, and then copy the output. Don't share this with anyone. Paste it back into Cowork and you should be connected. Now you can run through the exact same prompt set to set up your daily brief. After you send the test email, type in this prompt to turn this into a daily task that's run for you. Cowork sets up the automation, and tomorrow morning, it's in your inbox without you lifting a finger. So even if you're not a developer, this is how you get the same power. We just built a working daily brief by having a conversation. That's what the Zapier SDK unlocks. Your agent connected to the apps you actually use. The team is building guardrails next so your agent can't accidentally delete things, and event triggers so workflows fire automatically when something happens, not just on a schedule. Check out the Zapier SDK using the link in the description below, and now it's up to you to get started. I'm David DeWinter, and I'll see you in the next video.