
See the finished data quality chat, dashboard, and alerter, and get an overview of the two ways you'll use Zapier with AI: an agent through MCP and your own code through the SDK. Plus: how to build everything on free tiers.
Look at a real data quality result in Databricks and see why raw metrics alone don't get acted on. Learn how a runbook adds severity and ownership, and where Zapier's layers (Zaps, MCP server, SDK, and the new Connectors) each fit.
Understand the Model Context Protocol with a simple analogy and learn how an LLM loops through tool calls one at a time. This explains why the chat app you build next needs so little code.
Load the pipeline run data into a Databricks Free Edition table, create a service principal so Zapier can connect, and upload the runbook to Google Sheets.
Create a Zapier MCP server, connect Databricks and Google Sheets, and expose only the tools you need. Then test the server with a single request through the Anthropic API before writing any app code.
Walk through a Streamlit chat app of under 130 lines that connects Claude to your MCP server. Ask which critical expectations failed and who owns them, and watch Claude query Databricks and the runbook on its own.
Add ChatGPT as a third tool on your MCP server and have Claude hand its findings over for a summary. Learn how to route a task to a specific model and where the time in an agent run actually goes.
Learn how the SDK differs from MCP and set it up in minutes using Claude Code. Use the CLI to discover your connections, their actions, and the exact inputs each one needs.
Explore a Next.js and React dashboard that pulls run data from Databricks and owners from the runbook through the SDK, joins them in TypeScript, and shows pass rates, incidents, and top offenders at a glance.
Build an alerter that reads a single run, joins it with the runbook, identifies incidents, and looks up the right owner. It composes the alert email in a safe preview mode so nothing gets sent by accident.
Connect Gmail to Zapier, find the exact action to call with the CLI, and send a real incident alert straight to your inbox, carrying the severity and the remediation steps from the runbook. See how the same pattern works for Slack messages or Jira tickets.
Review the chat, dashboard, and alerter you built, and when to use MCP versus the SDK. Get ideas for taking it further, from severity-based routing to swapping in other models.
Zapier connects over 9,000 apps. This course shows you how to put all of those connections to work with AI, in two very different ways.
The use case is a problem most data teams know well. Databricks runs your data quality checks just fine, but the results end up in a big, noisy table. It tells you what failed. It doesn't tell you how serious it is, who owns it, or what to do about it. That context usually lives somewhere else entirely, like a runbook in a spreadsheet. In this course you will use Zapier to bridge that gap.
In the first part you build a conversational data quality assistant. You set up a Zapier MCP server that exposes Databricks and Google Sheets as tools, then put a small Streamlit chat app powered by Claude in front of it. You ask something like "Which failed expectations are critical and who owns them?" and Claude queries Databricks, looks up the owners in your runbook, and gives you the answer. You don't write a single SQL query or integration. You will also add ChatGPT as a third tool and see how easily you can route a specific task to a specific model.
In the second part you switch to the Zapier SDK for full control. With Claude Code handling the setup, you work with a Next.js and React dashboard that shows the health of 100 pipeline runs at a glance, and an alerter that detects incidents, finds the right owner, and emails them through Gmail. The connections underneath stay the same, but now your code decides every step. That makes it fast, predictable, and cheap, because no model has to reason through each call.
Along the way you will learn exactly when an agent is worth the extra time and tokens and when deterministic code is the better choice. You can follow along on free tiers: Zapier's free plan, Databricks Free Edition, Google Sheets, and the free trial credits Anthropic offers new API users.
By the end of this course you will know how to use Zapier as the connection layer for both AI agents and your own applications, and how to turn raw pipeline metrics into alerts that land in the right person's inbox.