Allowing AI to get clever with CRM data

Questions
1

I use Zapier to write data to my CRM, which has added much greater value to my CRM data since the days of MailChimp integration.

I recently discovered Zapier’s MCP, which allows me to ask my AI questions based on data it can pull from my accounts in CRM, MailChimp, Microsoft products, my meeting note taker, LearnDash LMS, the digital certificates I award, and website builder. Great… except I’m not able to read the really rich data that I’ve written to CRM.

I would love to get an answer from this question AI “Pull all the contacts from . Go through the notes since , compare with recent news, recommend a contact most appropriate for my products, and draft an email about .”

The public API only exposes a “Create Contact Note” function (write-only). There’s no corresponding “Get Notes” or “List Notes” function available, either through the standard actions or the raw API endpoint. So notes appear to be something the CRM lets you add via API, but not retrieve.

I know that your product development intentions for 2026 are to improve it to let us get more value from the existing functionality. This issue I am having is a usability issue that falls under that umbrella.

I know it is small ask that would probably have a big impact on the Dev Team, if you were to implement.

However, if you don’t ask…

1 Like
2

Thanks for reaching out! While we aren’t experts on Zapier’s MCP platform and exactly how it allows you to interact with Less Annoying CRM’s API, you can consult our API documentation to get a full sense of what functions are available. Our Zapier integration allows for creating notes but has no functionality for retrieving notes; the same is not true of our API when being accessed directly (not through the Zapier integration). You can see the available API functionality for notes in our documentation here. We have functions for getting a single note, listing all notes (with parameters to filter/sort the results), or getting all notes for a single contact. Your tooling would need to be able to pass in the right parameters and, of course, to parse and interpret the returned results, but that functionality is available.

I also want to mention, there is a third-party MCP server that was developed by an LACRM user. You can check that out here if you’re interested (it’s also available through our Integrations page). This was not built and is not maintained by the Less Annoying CRM team, so we can’t make promise it works perfectly or anything like that, but if you’re looking at MCP servers that could be a good option for you.

Let me know if you have any questions!

1 Like
3

Emily

I am not a coder (well, not for the last 30 years) and I don’t want to restart - but I am quite handy with Zapier.

Very helpful to know about that (unsupported) third-party MCP server. I will look into that and report back on my progress.

1 Like
4

I also am a reformed programmer (since 2003) and I use Zapier to make LACRM even more effective as a dashboard for my business.

Since you mention you’re using AI, I’ve found ChatGPT very helpful in creating Zapier “API Request” calls to access LACRM APIs that aren’t directly exposed - particularly for building the JSON to pass in.

1 Like
5

Here is good news on connecting an AI to CRM to extract information, which AI can work on..

I found the link Emily sent me quite intimidating. I didn’t understand any of it.

  • so I asked Claude to read the page and break it down into simple steps.
  • It made 7 steps.
  • First, you must have Claude app installed. It doesn’t work from a browser
  • Along the way it found that I needed to install a Javascript toolset. Node.js It told me where to find the install and how to do it.
    • It took 20 minutes for this to install, so be patient.
    • Must do a full reboot afterwards
  • Another tricky part was editing a configuration file. Claude gave me content to copy and paste as an insert into the file.
    • I got it wrong.
    • I gave Claude a screenshot. From there it knew the problem and gave me the a complete replacement config file to copy and paste in.

Now it works. My first tests were

“the Group “x” has thousands of contacts. How many different companies are there, associated with the contacts in this group?”

"how many contacts in group “X” live within 50 miles of the city “y”. (these are people that someone can drive to, to meet in person)

Don’t let these techy pages scare you off. It took about 1 hour to complete this. Again, I am not a coder.

2 Likes
6

Thanks for sharing, I think that’ll be really helpful for some people. I also just want to mention that we’re looking into ways to make that simpler (which mostly means that we would host the MCP server ourselves so you wouldn’t need to do as much configuration to get this working).

No firm timelines yet, but I just wanted to say that we’re not ignoring this.

1 Like