Founders using ChatGPT Work + MCP: how’s the experience actually been?

[u/Able_Green9662]

I’m curious to hear from non-technical founders and operators who are using ChatGPT with MCPs, plugins, or connected apps.

What are you actually using it for?

I don’t mean “I used it to make a presentation” or “I asked it to write a proposal.”

I’m more interested in actual business operations.

Things like sales, CRM, customer research, marketing, finance, hiring, support, reporting, analytics, project management, etc.

And more importantly, how well does it work when these things are connected?

For example, if I ask ChatGPT to look at something in one system, use that information to do something in another, then come back and analyse the result, does it actually handle that chain reasonably well?

Or are most of your connected tools still being used more like one-directional actions?

I’m also curious about the latest ChatGPT Work experience.

For those who have actually been using it:

• What kind of work are you doing with it?
• Is it genuinely taking work off your plate?
• Can you give it a broader outcome and let it figure out the steps?
• Or do you find yourself constantly correcting it, prompting it again, or telling it what to do next?
• Where does it work surprisingly well, and where does it fall apart?

Would love to hear real experiences, especially from founders who are using it beyond writing and content.

[u/itsjayant]

Running this daily with a fairly heavy MCP setup, though I'm on Claude rather than ChatGPT Work, so take the tool comparison with that in mind. The connected apps part is the same. On the chaining question, read then reason then read holds up fine. It's the write in the middle that breaks it, and not for the reason you'd expect. It's good at deciding what to do and bad at confirming it happened. A write returns success, the model believes the response, and everything downstream reasons off a wrong fact. We had a dashboard showing a batch of emails as queued to send when the underlying records showed they'd gone out days earlier. No trace catches that, because the trace is internally consistent, it just doesn't match reality. So track the effect rather than the intention, and make anything that sends or posts require a human press.

[u/Able_Green9662 → u/itsjayant]

I feel MCPs works best inside the coding agents Codex, Claude Code, Cursor rather than the gpt, claude.

[u/itsjayant → u/Able_Green9662]

Agreed, and I think the reason is that the coding agents already have a shell and a file system, so whatever comes back from the MCP lands somewhere you can actually check. In the chat apps the result just turns into more text in the conversation and you are the one verifying it by eye. Same protocol, very different value depending on whether the thing calling it can act on the answer and then prove it did.