Intro - Manage application operations using AI clients via Zoho MCP

1. Overview

Zoho MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables AI clients to interact with Zoho Creator and other connected applications using natural language prompts. Through a set of predefined tools and operations exposed by Zoho MCP, AI clients can retrieve data, perform application operations, and execute workflows. MCP allows users to perform cross application workflows and operations using conversational prompts without manually invoking APIs, handling authentication, or building custom integrations . This tutorial series guides you through using Zoho MCP and AI clients to perform operations in Zoho Creator and other connected applications. Claude AI is used throughout this tutorial series for demonstration purposes.

Note:

You can use any AI client that supports Zoho MCP. While the concepts remain the same, the setup and configuration steps may vary depending across AI systems. Refer to the documentation of your chosen AI system for detailed instructions on configuration.
Invoking Zoho Creator tools through Zoho MCP consumes Developer API calls from your Creator account. You can monitor your Developer API calls usage and limit from the Billing section. Additionally, GenAI platforms such as Claude consumes tokens for processing prompts and responses as billed by the AI provider.

2. What you will build

By the end of this tutorial series, you will have a marketing operations AI assistant that uses Zoho MCP to interact with business applications through natural language prompts. The AI assistant will retrieve campaign data from a Zoho Creator marketing application, analyze campaign performance, identify potential risks, and escalate blockers to Monday.com for cross-team coordination. The same implementation pattern can be extended to perform operations across your own applications and business workflows.

3. What you will learn

By the end of this tutorial, you will learn to:

Configure Zoho MCP with Zoho Creator and other products
Define the data the AI can access and the actions it can perform in an application through MCP tools
Connect an AI client to Zoho MCP
Access data and perform operations in Zoho Creator using natural language prompts through an AI assistant
Perform cross-application operations and workflows between Monday.com and Zoho Creator using natural language prompts

4. Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial series, ensure that the required tools are installed and all the given dependencies are configured.

Tools

Dependencies

Create the Marketing Campaign Operations application in Creator
Generate API token in your Monday.com account
Get admin user access in Zoho Creator
Account owner role in Claude AI

5. Explore use case for this tutorial

Zylker technologies is ready to launch a new product and wants to initiate market campaigning. The marketing team uses a Zoho Creator application to manage campaign activities such as content creation, design reviews, approval workflows, launch timelines, budget tracking, and campaign readiness assessments. To ensure successful campaign launches, marketing managers need to retrieve campaign information, evaluate campaign risks, monitor dependencies across work streams, and escalate blocked activities for resolution.

Traditionally, implementing these capabilities would require developers to write custom Deluge scripts, invoke application APIs, manage authentication across systems, and build integrations to coordinate workflows between Zoho Creator and external applications such as Monday.com.

To simplify these interactions, Zylker uses an AI assistant connected to the Marketing Campaign Operations application and Monday.com with Zoho MCP. Marketing managers can interact with the assistant using natural language prompts such as "Show campaigns at risk", "List blocked activities requiring attention", "What is the current status of the Summer Launch campaign?", or "Escalate pending approvals to Monday.com". The AI assistant retrieves the required data, performs the requested operations, and returns an appropriate response to the manager.

5.1. Understand marketing campaign operations application

The following diagram provides an overview of the application's key components, such as forms, reports, pages, blueprints, and workflows, and illustrates how they interact to support the business process covered in this tutorial.

5.2. Create marketing campaign operations application

Choose one of the following methods to create the application:

Quick start

Import the application: Download and import the provided .ds file and sample data to install the pre-configured application.
Create using Zia: Download and Use this prompt to generate the application with Zia, Zoho Creator's AI-powered application builder. Zia (GenAI app builder) builds the complete application, including forms, reports, pages, and workflows, and automatically populates it with sample data for immediate use.

Steps to create the application:

Follow the below steps to create the Marketing Campaign Operations application required for this tutorial.

Import the application

Create using Zia

Import the application

Download the provided .ds file and its sample data and store it in your local storage.
Navigate to the admin dashboard of your Creator app and click + Create Solution.
Click Select in the Applications card to create a new Zoho Creator application.
Click Import in the Import from file card to import the downloaded .ds file and create the application.
Click Local storage, locate the downloaded .ds file on your system, and select it to begin the import.
Click Save Script to import the application. After the import is complete, if your browser displays a leave site confirmation, confirm the action to open the imported application.

The Marketing Campaign Operations application has now been successfully imported and is ready to use. Next, import the sample data into each report to populate the application with data required for this tutorial.

Open each report, click Import, and select the corresponding sample data file from your local storage using the mapping provided in the following table:

Report	Sample data file
Campaigns Report	Campaigns Report.csv
Escalations Report	Escalations Report.csv
Risk Report	Risk Report.csv
Approvals Report	Approvals Report.csv
Deliverables Report	Deliverables Report.csv

Once all the sample data has been imported, the application is fully configured and is ready for the tutorial.

Create using Zia

Navigate to the admin dashboard of your Creator app and click + Create Solution.
Click Select in the Applications card to create a new Zoho Creator application.
Click Create in the Create using Zia option to open the GenAI application builder.
Download this prompt , copy and paste it exactly as provided into the input area, and click the blue arrow ( ) icon.

Once the prompt is submitted, the App Builder begins generating the application's Data Model based on the given use cases. The Data Model defines the application's components(forms, fields) and how they are connected.
Click Create Application once the Data Model is generated.

The App Builder automatically generates the application's components(forms, reports, pages), configures user permissions, and establishes the required blueprints and workflows. Marketing Campaign Operations application is created by the App Builder and is ready to use.
Click Access Application, to open your Marketing Campaign Operations application and continue with the tutorial.

Along with the application, Zia also populates the application with sample data, which you can use as is or modify to suit your requirements.

6. Episodes

The tutorial series is structured into incremental episodes, each completing a part of the solution. Complete the given episodes in sequence to build your MCP-powered AI solution.

7. Related topics

What's next

The next step is to begin Episode 1, where you will create your MCP server, connect Zoho Creator and Monday.com, and configure the required tools.

Before starting the tutorial, make sure to understand the concept of MCP and how to create applications in Zoho Creator.

Manage application operations using AI clients via Zoho MCP | Zoho Creator Academy