Claude Integration and MCP Are Eating the World

Anthropic recently released a couple of great new features. One is web search, which arrived after major competitors like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Mistral had already added similar capabilities to their chat apps a long time ago.

But that's not the whole story. They also released another feature called Integrations.

If you haven't read about it, I suggest you do.

Here is the official announcement also on X:

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Anthropic
@AnthropicAI
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May 1
Today we're announcing Integrations, a new way to connect your apps and tools to Claude.

We're also expanding Claude's Research capabilities with an advanced mode that searches the web, your Google Workspace, and now your Integrations too.

To put it mildly, this is and will change the entire digital economy.

I expect it to be the start of a new wave of GenAI progress in the coming months and year, and Anthropic has begun it expertly.

Why This is a Big Deal

Well, the entire GenAI trend we've seen so far has typically relied on a few sources of information:

• The data the language model (like GPT or Claude) already knows from its training.
• Data from the internet if the model had access to it.
• Optionally, documents you uploaded during conversations.

This is mainly how it worked for everyday users, not large businesses who have the resources to connect APIs and applications automatically for things like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), data analysis, and other business situations.

But for ordinary people, and even for most business uses until now, if you wanted to use AI's intelligence, you had to look for and gather the necessary data for a reliable answer (for example, upload your invoice, a letter from authorities, generating business slides, or whatever).

Let's say, for instance, you want AI to help you plan your trip.

You would typically have to:

• Go to, say, Skyscanner, choose a few flights.
• Check Booking.com.
• Look at TripAdvisor.
• And many more...

Some information is available on the public internet, so it might already be accessible via web search directly from the AI. But some data isn't, or at least isn't complete, like information about specific hotels or flights in this example.

With Claude Integration, this manual work is becoming a thing of the past.

Claude has released a technology you might have heard of called MCP.

This technology connects your AI (Claude, GPT or whatever) to external data sources such as your email, cloud storage, CMS and hundreds if not thousands of other sources.

Source: a16z.com

Until now, MCP required installing and setting up APIs on your computer. With Claude Integration, this is no longer necessary because Anthropic has built it into their app using a feature called Server-Side-Events.

Please note that the Claude Integration feature is currently only available to users on the Max Plan, which costs $100 and above. But I expect it to be released for Pro users soon.

As of today, Claude Max users can now add external data sources at the click of a button

This means you can now integrate a whole lot of applications with just a few clicks. Soon, I expect this to be like a new app store, opening up a whole new world of possibilities, along with its opportunities and risks.

An Example: Planning a Trip with Integrations

That said, imagine the same situation as above: I want to travel somewhere this weekend where the weather is mild, it's affordable, and it isn't too crowded.

With Claude integrating a bunch of websites and using smart prompting, I can explore a whole world of possibilities that meet my criteria without having to jump between many websites and getting bogged down by information that isn't relevant to me.

Whenever booking.com and skyscanner join the mcp partner programme, I can now add them to Claude with just a few clicks.

Integrations:

• Booking.com and
• Skyscanner

and use a prompt as simple as: find the cheapest flight to Tallinn next weekend from Friday afternoon or Saturday morning and hotel less than 100€ per night and good rating.

Here is what I already have today using MCP (before the current integration feature) and the result is similar to what I expect:

Thinking About the Future: Impact on Tasks and Jobs

We talk a lot about how AI will affect jobs. In the past three years or so, AI has already eliminated tasks or at least significantly reduced them. But many tasks (I prefer not to say jobs, but tasks, because a job may remain but change the tasks it includes) were hard to automate reliably among other reasons because they need access to private company data like our CMS, spreadsheets, etc.

Many companies have already started to automate these tasks and provide smoother solutions for their employees, but for ordinary people, this is still a long way off.

With Claude Integration every user with access to Claude Desktop will be able to connect all the apps they use daily and let AI perform the tasks they used to spend hours doing, often by combining information from different places, like:

• Handling customer support emails.
• Working with spreadsheets.
• Making presentations.
• And many more.

Here are just a few of the applications that Claude can access without leaving the chat window:

• Atlassian’s Jira
• Atlassian’s Confluence
• Zapier
• Cloudflare
• Intercom
• Asana
• Square
• Sentry
• PayPal
• Linear
• Plaid

What about ChatGPT?
Anthorpic has fortunately released the MCP-Standard as open source that can and will be implemented client and server-side by any company out there, including openai. So expect Openai and all other LLMs to be riding the MCP wave soon.

And make no mistake, I'm not talking about just letting AI generate an outline or text. The future is that it will complete tasks from start to finish.

All it needs is access to the tools you use.

Final thoughts

I wrote previously a lot about MCP, and honestly, I was anticipating this step. It is almost certain that it will make our life a whole lot easier but at the same time, it will question and challenge tasks that primarily involve copying and pasting information between apps with with little or no human value added.