What should I connect my AI to first?
Email, calendar, and your decisions log — in that order. Those three feeds give you 80% of the grounding for 20% of the setup. bRRAIn ships MCP connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar, and markdown decision logs out of the box.
Why the first three connectors matter most
The first MCP connections you wire up set the ceiling on everything that follows. Pick three that cover the majority of daily context and your AI feels useful in a week. Pick three niche ones and six months in you still have a demo-grade deployment. The evidence from deployments we see: email, calendar, and a decisions log are the universal winners. They capture who is doing what, when things happen, and why choices were made — the three dimensions that ground almost every enterprise question. Eighty percent of the value, twenty percent of the setup, across industries.
Email as the first feed
Email is where decisions leak, relationships get formed, and commitments are made — usually in prose that never lands in a CRM. Connecting the email connector through the MCP Gateway lets the model read recent threads (with role scoping) and draft or send messages on demand. The Security Policy Engine enforces which senders, recipients, and labels each role can touch. Within a day, your AI can summarise the inbox, surface stalled threads, and draft replies grounded in the actual conversation. That single feed transforms the assistant from "smart" to "informed."
Calendar as the second feed
Calendar adds the time dimension. It tells the model what is happening this week, what meeting is next, who is attending, and what prep is needed. Wiring Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook through the MCP Gateway gives the agent the ability to answer "what should I prep for this afternoon" with a grounded answer, not a guess. Combined with the email feed, the Consolidator can merge thread state with meeting context into a single morning briefing. The Memory Engine hands that briefing to the model at session boot. Two connectors, a serious jump in usefulness.
The decisions log as the third feed
Email captures conversations; calendar captures time; a decisions log captures choices. This is the feed most teams skip — and it is the highest-leverage one. A simple markdown file or doc folder, updated when a real decision is made, becomes an institutional memory the AI can cite. bRRAIn's Document Portal hosts this feed cleanly, and the decisions MCP connector ingests updates as they happen. The POPE graph turns the log into queryable nodes: who decided what, when, with what rationale. Three weeks in, the AI answers "why did we choose this approach" with sources, not speculation.
Expanding beyond the starter three
Once email, calendar, and decisions are live, the next connector tier is obvious and cheap. CRM, code repo, ticketing system, and doc store each extend the graph into a specific domain. The Integrations index lists what bRRAIn ships out of the box, and the SDK integration recipes walk through adding custom connectors. If you are not sure where your team's highest-value third feed lives, book a demo and we will map it in the call. Start with the three universals, then scale. The sequencing matters.
Relevant bRRAIn products and services
- MCP Gateway — the sandboxed layer that every first connector wires into.
- Document Portal — the place your decisions log lives where the AI can read it.
- Consolidator / Integration Layer — merges email, calendar, and decisions into a single morning briefing.
- POPE Graph RAG — converts the three starter feeds into queryable institutional memory.
- Integrations index — the catalogue of connectors beyond the starter three.
- SDK integration recipes — patterns for adding custom connectors to the gateway.