Use Claude to Talk to Your Airtable Data via CData Connect AI

Stanley Liu
Stanley Liu
Associate Technical Product Marketer
Leverage the CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server to enable Claude to securely answer questions and take actions on your Airtable data for you.

Claude is a family of advanced large language models (LLMs) built by Anthropic, an AI research company founded in 2021. These models power the Claude conversational assistant and developer tools.

CData Connect AI offers a dedicated cloud-to-cloud interface for connecting to Airtable data. The CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server enables secure communication between Claude and Airtable. This allows you to ask questions and take actions on your Airtable data using Claude, all without the need for data replication to a natively supported database. With its inherent optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect AI efficiently channels all supported SQL operations, including filters and JOINs, directly to Airtable. This leverages server-side processing to swiftly deliver the requested Airtable data.

Step 1: Configure Airtable Connectivity for Claude

Connectivity to Airtable from Claude is made possible through CData Connect AI Remote MCP. To interact with Airtable data from Claude, we start by creating and configuring a Airtable connection in CData Connect AI.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
  2. Select "Airtable" from the Add Connection panel
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Airtable.

    APIKey, BaseId and TableNames parameters are required to connect to Airtable. ViewNames is an optional parameter where views of the tables may be specified.

    • APIKey : API Key of your account. To obtain this value, after logging in go to Account. In API section click Generate API key.
    • BaseId : Id of your base. To obtain this value, it is in the same section as the APIKey. Click on Airtable API, or navigate to https://airtable.com/api and select a base. In the introduction section you can find "The ID of this base is appxxN2ftedc0nEG7."
    • TableNames : A comma separated list of table names for the selected base. These are the same names of tables as found in the UI.
    • ViewNames : A comma separated list of views in the format of (table.view) names. These are the same names of the views as found in the UI.
  4. Click Save & Test

Step 2: Connect Claude to CData Connect AI

Follow these steps to add a CData Connect AI connector in Claude:

  1. Sign in to Claude.ai or create a new account.
  2. Expand the left navigation menu.
  3. In the bottom-left corner, click your user name and select Settings from the menu. The Settings screen appears.
  4. In the Settings screen, click Connectors.
  5. Click the button to Browse Connectors.
  6. Search for "CData Connect AI" and click the listing.
  7. Click "Connect" and sign into your Connect AI account.
  8. After connecting, Claude opens a new chat.

Step 3: Explore Live Airtable Data with Claude

  1. You can now start exploring your data with natural language prompts. Claude outlines the steps it uses to retrieve data from the source in CData Connect AI. Refer to CData's prompt library for prompt ideas.

NOTE: Claude's setup process is subject to change. Refer to Claude's documentation for the latest setup information.

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