Six Claude Connectors Every Professional Should Set Up (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today, I'll walk you through the six best kinds of connectors you need to put into Cloud today as a working professional. Five of them are nearly universal and the sixth is job specific, so I'll show you mine. I'm David DeWinter and let's start with your first connector, your communication tools. This covers three types of apps, your email, any chat apps you use, and your calendar. So let's tackle email and calendar first with Microsoft 365. Today, I'm using the Cloud desktop app, but you can use the web app or the mobile app for any of the connectors that I show. To add the Microsoft 365 connector, go ahead and click customize on the left sidebar and then scroll down and click on connectors. Click the add button in the top right and then click browse connectors. Here, you can see the most popular connectors in this list and search for the connector that you want using this text box. Search for Microsoft 365 and you should see it pop up below. Click anywhere on the card and you should see a connect button in the top right portion of the pane. Click connect and then sign in as you and if it says you need admin approval, you need to request it from IT. Once you're connected, this button should change to say disconnect. If you wanna know more about any specific connector, go back to your connectors view and then click on it here. When you scroll down, you'll see all the tools you have available to use. Now for Microsoft 365, you can now start a new chat that looks like this. The beauty of this is that it's simple but it's super powerful. If you want to look at our Outlook calendar for today and unread mail from the last 24 hours, then we're looking for just a one screen briefing telling us what we need to take action on. If you get a ton of email, I recommend you extend this prompt so it only shows you the most relevant messages. There's a link in the description where you can access all these prompts. After about a minute, you'll get your brief. See, mine has my calendar for the day as well as an email that I need to reply to before my next meeting. Notice how that email is flagged first before the other emails that aren't tied to a meeting. And because I asked for a webpage report, I have these cool next steps buttons which I can just click to get started. As an example, one of those emails asked me to find the onboarding guide. So clicking that, ask Claude to find the onboarding guide and then draft a reply. Now, if you use Google, you can use the Gmail and Google Calendar connectors to achieve the same goal. Now, communication also includes tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. And with those, you can do something very similar. Here, I'm asking Claude to catch me up on what I've missed in Slack, show me what's most important to reply to, then the FYIs. And I've turned on privacy because this is referencing a real Slack. So let's see what it comes up with. Because my prompt was simple, it came back as prose. So I'm missing a DM that I need to reply to. There's some other DMs here and maybe some other threads that I should engage in. But these connectors aren't just about reading and filtering messages. You can also reply to messages as well. So for example, in Slack, you can schedule messages in the future. I'm actually doing this so I don't send a message to Carol live. But let's ask if she would like to meet one-on-one to talk more about a topic we're both interested in. And it's the same pattern. You wait a couple seconds, Claude confirms the task is complete. And then inside of Slack, you see the message scheduled to be sent. That moves us to connector number two, your files and storage. Now, you can connect most cloud storage providers. Today, let's check out Google Drive. You've seen how to turn on connectors already. So let's just jump straight in. Now, all of these storage providers have files and they have folders. Think about everything that you can do with a file in a folder. That's now accessible to you through Claude. For example, you can have it search for folders and files, list out files, copy files and folders, and rename them. Now, you typically won't find the ability to upload files through these connectors. That's because the model would need to read the entire file and that wastes a lot of tokens. But prompts like this work just fine. See, in the scripts 2026 folder, it's found all of my scripts, that's both folders and files. And then it created this new folder. The most popular storage providers have their own connectors. So you see Box and Dropbox are here. And to connect to OneDrive or SharePoint, search for the Microsoft 365 connector. Onto connector number three, your team's brain, which means internal wikis, personal notebooks, and everything in between. Let's see how that works using Notion. Now, before connectors, if you wanted information from your wiki inside of Claude, you'd have to copy and paste it by hand, not good. But now Claude could read that info on its own. One of my favorite ways to use this is to keep playbooks inside of Notion and then have Claude reference those while I ask a question. Let's see what it comes up with for this title. Now, the titles it comes back with aren't that bad, but they play on curiosity, which is important for browse traffic, not search. Say I actually wanna go after search traffic instead. Claude can do its own research on this and then turn it into a playbook that it sends to Notion. Deep research is a trigger phrase that tells Claude to do this research. And then you see at the end, that's gotta be added back to Notion. When it's finished, we see this new playbook added at the bottom of the page. And you get all of this just from the three-line prompt we just ran. Now, connector number four is different because this one depends on your role. In sales, it could be your CRM like HubSpot. In marketing, SEMrush for SEO. In finance, QuickBooks, who's also the sponsor of today's video. So let me show you how it works to keep track of your finances. You can connect QuickBooks just like other connectors and out of the gate, you find some pretty cool stuff. For example, instead of having to log into QuickBooks to get reports, you can create a P&L and balance sheet and other reports straight from Claude. You'll actually get an interactive statement. So the profit and loss shows the high-level overview, but if you wanna see the detailed line item report, just click view details. You can get out of those details by clicking the X in the top right, and then scroll down to see your balance sheet. But finance departments don't only create reports, they also forecast. So one cool thing the QuickBooks connector can do is forecast based on industry benchmarks. When you enter your business into QuickBooks, you choose an industry. Like for us, it's limited service restaurants. In the response this time, I can see how my revenue stacks up against competitors in my local area, and I can also see how my profit stacks up. But instead of telling me I'm doing so much better than my peers on my margin, it tells it like it is. What's more likely is I haven't logged all my costs, so I need to do that before any future analyses. The connector can also help with your accounts receivable process. For example, you can ask what invoices are open, and a few seconds later, you'll get a quick report on that. Even better, I need Kevin to pay up his invoice, so I can just ask Claude to send him a payment reminder. Then you can go to QuickBooks, click on the invoice, and you'll see that it's been sent. To get started with QuickBooks Online and connecting it with Claude, check out the link in the description below for 50% off for three months. Connector number five is one I find super valuable, which is your AI note taker. Now, most note takers have a connector on the market. We'll explore it using Fathom AI. Now, most people are not used to using meeting notes as context for AI. We're gonna change that today. I'll put my custom privacy skill blocker up again because these are real calls, but I want to look at all the calls I've had this week and show me action items, what I've promised to follow up with and by when, and also tell me about any deal that sounds at risk. After a few minutes, I get some action items and some deals that might be at risk, but we can do something better. If you have Claude co-work, you can make something really cool called a Live Artifact. A Live Artifact is a mini web app that updates dynamically based on the data in your connectors. So here, this artifact will show every single meeting as a card with a summary and a list of action items and allow me to group meetings by similar participants so I can see history. Let's see what it creates for us. A few minutes later, we get this rich history of all of our meetings. We've got the filter list up top here and we've got meeting summaries and action items down below. Once you create the artifact, it shows up with this special icon pinned in the left sidebar. And then when I have my next meeting, all I need to do to refresh this is to open the artifact. And by the way, you can do this for any connector, just keep an eye on your token costs. Finally, connector number six is your projects and your tasks. Let's see how that works with Trello. Now, Trello is a task management app, which means you can have Claude read tasks from Trello or you can have it create tasks in Trello instead. Here, I'm just creating a number of different tasks that I wanna see come up in Trello Live. Not only am I providing the task names, I'm also selecting a label to apply to each task. This connector makes it very easy to create and update tasks without doing it by hand. Now, before we wrap up, I've got one more thing to show you. The real power here isn't one connector at a time, it's connecting all of your apps so they work together. So here's an example that runs every Monday morning. With all these connectors, I can ask Claude to be my chief of staff. It can pull my calendar, my unread email, meeting notes and commitments I've made last week, any docs I need to review for the meetings this week, as well as any client who's gone overdue in QuickBooks. Then once it's assembled all of this, give it back to me and then put my top five priorities in my Trello to-do list board. This gives me my week at a glance brief and my top to-dos inside of Trello. Those are the six best kinds of connectors to set up in Claude. And now you've got everything you need to get started. Check out QuickBooks online if you're looking for an accounting solution. I'm David, I'll see you in the next video.