AI Fundamentals

You've probably heard words like agent, plug in, skill, MCP. To me, they sound like a lot of jargon and they blur together. My name is Nicole Khan, and I'm the VP of Design at Carta. In this video, we're gonna clear up AI vocabulary with five terms simply defined, and I'll show you how they all fit together.

Here's what we'll cover. The five terms you actually need to know, how they connect to each other, and why it all matters when you're working with real financial data. Ready? Let's go.

I'm going to pair simple definitions with an analogy as I explain these terms. In this case, I'm gonna use a restaurant kitchen fully outfitted with chefs, top of the line cooking equipment, and the best recipes out there. Very simply, Claude is an agent. It's a system that can think, reason, and act on its own with little direction.

Every time you open up a chat in Claude, you're initiating a new agent to complete a task. In our restaurant analogy, agents are chefs. You place an order, the chef knows how to execute it and get you your food. Next step is MCP, which stands for model context protocol.

It's the standard that lets Claude connect to any external platform. It's sometimes referred to as a connector. We have a Carta connector that you can hook up to your Claude instance. And there are many connectors for other software.

Back to our restaurant kitchen. The MCP is all infrastructure, gas lines, electrical hookups, the standard connections that every appliance plugs into. Without the infrastructure, the chef can't cook anything. In practice, a connector is what lets Claude reach into a live system and pull out real data.

The Carta connector gives cloud access to your actual fund data. NAV, IRR, LP commitments, capital activity, they all come directly from Carta's data warehouse. A Gmail connector gives cloud access to your inbox. A Slack connector gives it to your team's conversations.

The connector is the same concept in every case. Without it, cloud is working from memory and memory is exactly when you get that confident wrong answer that Henry warned about in the prior video. Tools are the specific equipment at each station. The grill, the sand mixer, the chef's knife.

Tools are how Claude moves from chatting about things to actually doing things. Searching the web, generating a PDF, creating an Excel file are all tool calls that your agent is equipped with. Inside the Carta plugin, the individual tools are functions Claude calls in the background. You never see these calls happen.

You ask a question and Claude strings the right ones together to answer it. Each tool is still doing one thing, fetch this, return that. A skill is a safe set of instructions that tells Claude how to complete a specific task from start to finish. It's the equivalent of the recipe card in the kitchen, laminated, sitting at that station, written once, followed the same way each time.

Cloud skills work just the same. You write them once, edit them as needed, and invoke them endlessly to get that same repeatable result. Carta ships prebuilt skills inside the investor plugin. Say, generate my SOI, and Claude follows the same steps every time.

Connect to Carta, pull the right data, format the output, flag anything missing. Same recipe, same result, every time anyone on your team runs it. You can also make your own custom skills or even customize Cartas. We'll get into the details of skills in a later video.

A plugin is a bundle of tool calls and skills that guide an agent how to perform a set of tasks. Carta has a plugin for fun admin data, one for cap tables and one for our CRM. In our restaurant analogy, a plugin is a station in the kitchen, each one fully set up for a specific type of cooking. Carta plugin is really where the magic happens.

It has everything you need all packaged up. The skills, MCP, the tools, you don't need to really worry about the details. If you've installed the plugin, you're ready to roll. Quick recap using the kitchen.

The MCP is the kitchen's infrastructure, the standard connections that make everything possible. The plugin is the cooking station fully equipped for one type of job. The tool is the equipment And the skill is that recipe card written once repeatable forever. Now you know what the pieces are.

In the next video, we'll get your workspace set up, desktop app, plugins installed, folders organized so you can start using all of this. When you're ready, click below.