How to connect Ably to Claude Cowork

Cowork is Anthropic's AI agent for knowledge work. Think of it as Claude Code for everything else. It works autonomously with your computer, local files, and applications to accomplish complex tasks.

This guide walks you through the easiest and most secure way to connect your Ably account to Cowork via Composio Connect, enabling it to list all active channels and their details, get message history from 'support-chat' channel, show presence history for 'live-event' channel, and more such actions on your behalf without compromising your account security.

Connecting Ably to Claude Cowork

1. Open Customize

In Claude Desktop, click Customize in the left sidebar, then select Connectors and click the + icon at the top.

2. Add the Composio MCP server

Click Add custom connector and paste in the Composio MCP server URL:

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agent for general knowledge work. It can use your computer, files, and connected applications to complete longer-running tasks across your work tools.

With Composio Connect, Cowork can securely access apps like Ably through MCP without you sharing account credentials directly with the agent.

The Ably MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your Ably account. It provides structured and secure access to your real-time messaging infrastructure, so your agent can manage channels, monitor presence, analyze usage, and handle messaging workflows for your applications.

• Channel management and creation: Seamlessly create, initialize, or retrieve real-time messaging channels so your agent can orchestrate chat, data sync, and collaboration features on demand.
• Presence tracking and analytics: Ask your agent to query current presence states or review historical presence data across multiple channels, gaining insights into user activity and engagement patterns.
• Message history and audit: Retrieve detailed message histories from any channel, enabling your agent to audit communication, recover missed messages, or analyze message flows for debugging and compliance.
• Push notification subscription management: Let your agent list, manage, or unsubscribe devices from push notification channels, ensuring targeted and controlled delivery of real-time alerts to clients.
• Application statistics and monitoring: Have your agent fetch in-depth usage metrics—like message counts, channel activity, and API request stats—so you can monitor health, optimize performance, and manage resources with confidence.