Connect JACK to your AI assistant and it can use JACK's own tools to read your business data for you. Write a prompt or build a skill and your daily reports, review your estimates, quote comparisons are done in seconds rather than in an afternoon, giving you time back to invest in your business. 

A tool is one thing the assistant can look up in JACK. Listing your jobs is a tool. Pulling the financial summary for a single job is a different tool. Reading a client's contact record is another one again. Each tool does one job and nothing else.

You do not choose tools yourself. You ask a question in plain language and the assistant works out which tools it needs, then asks your permission before it uses them. A question about what is overdue across your jobs might use three or four tools before the assistant has enough to answer.

The tools you get are decided by your role in JACK. Any tool your role cannot use is not offered to the assistant at all, so a user with no access to invoices gets no invoice tools. To see what you have, ask your assistant what JACK tools it has available and it will list them.

A skill is a set of saved instructions that teaches your assistant how you want a job done, so you stop explaining it every time. A skill for a weekly site report would hold the format you use, the order you want the sections in and what to leave out.

Tools and skills solve different problems. A tool reads the information. A skill knows what to do with it once it arrives.

Skills sit in your assistant, not in JACK. Setting one up changes nothing about your JACK account and does not widen what the assistant can reach.

A prompt is what you type into the chat. It is a single instruction for a single task, and it is gone once the conversation ends.

Clear prompts get better answers. Name the job, say what you want and say what you want back. "Summarise where 14 Barker Street is up to, including any open Variations and anything overdue" will get you further than "how is Barker Street going". If the first answer is not quite right, say what to change rather than starting again.

The connection earns its keep on the jobs you already do by hand, usually first thing in the morning or last thing before a client call.

Ask what is overdue across every job and you get bills, invoices and follow-ups in one answer instead of opening each job in turn. Ask where a single job is up to before you ring the client and you get the program, the open Variations and anything outstanding without preparing for the call yourself. Ask what a similar home has actually cost you and you get a range drawn from your own completed jobs rather than a guess.

Answers come back in seconds, so it suits the moments when you would otherwise put the question off. Voice works too, which is useful in the Ute between sites.

MCP is an open standard, so the same ideas appear across the major assistants under different names. The table below covers the wording you are most likely to see.

JACK is tested and supported with Claude, which is why our setup instructions and training cover Claude specifically. Compatibility with ChatGPT and Grok is being verified and we cannot support those connections yet.