What Founders Solved With Our MCP

By Rachita Paes

When we built the Justworks MCP, the idea was simple: our customers were already doing their work in AI tools, but their Justworks data wasn't there with them. Getting it meant logging in, finding a report, exporting it, and uploading it somewhere else…enough friction to cause a serious barrier

Justworks MCP is an AI-native data connector that brings payroll and HR data directly into AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. We invited small business leaders to our nyc office to see what problems they could solve for their businesses with our MCP.

Here's what was built, solved, and discovered.      

The Use Cases

Cost-benefit analysis on part-time roles. A founder with a growing list of part-time employees, had been sitting on the question of whether to convert select roles to full-time employees for three years. Their question was answered in 30 minutes without needing to pull their business manager into it.

Compensation benchmarking. A finance leader analyzed years of merit-based compensation increases, aggregated by department and benchmarked against companies at a similar stage of growth. The output was a box grid against industry ranges and a comparison of compensation changes year-over-year.

Quarterly board reporting. One participant built their first artifact to help prep for board meetings: an executive summary covering headcount, hires, payroll costs, salary spread, and PTO usage by department, set to refresh automatically on the first of each quarter.

Commission and attrition risk. Six months of payroll data surfaced a correlation between declining commissions and employees who'd left. When the customer felt there was more nuance to consider, the analysis pulled in performance ratings and surfaced employees who were a flight risk.

These are practical challenges leaders face every day, solved where people are already working. In a world where leaders are expected to move quickly and efficiently, the value of Justworks’ MCP was felt in one afternoon.

3 Things We Didn't Expect

1. Leaders helped build each other’s prompts.  These were questions that sat in the back of founders minds, oftentimes lingering and causing friction. Questions that sat between sensitive and potentially urgent, but almost always incredibly tough to discuss openly. Peer-to-peer discussion sparked the most engaging behavior. Founders, feeling community between each other, helped them reach solutions more quickly.

2. The value of Justworks’ MCP is in real business outcomes. We built a sandbox,  fictional employees, and fictional payroll so no one would have to experiment with anything real. It only lasted about 30 minutes because once the questions got interesting, everyone switched to their own Justworks data and used the time as a real working session. This was an interesting microcosm of how we work with our community every day, just all in one room instead of through the phone or email. 

3. Problems solved revealed new opportunities to build.  We expected people to get answers. We didn't fully expect the exchange to run both ways. One HR lead started talking through her benefits setup and found it raising additional questions she hadn't thought to ask  as the solo HR leader at her company. The most valuable moments were questions that pushed the conversation further.

We called the event a hackathon, but the afternoon was really about our community leaders comparing notes and answering important questions that really impact the shape of their businesses. The Justworks MCP can be connected here. The questions you've been sitting on are probably a lot closer to answered than you think. 

And, if you’re already connected, here are a few prompts to test out…

  1. Analyze our merit increases over the last 5 years by department. Benchmark us against similar-stage companies. Show me, visually, where we're ahead/behind.

  2. Build me a quarterly board artifact: headcount, new hires, payroll costs, salary spread by department, PTO usage. Make it professional, in our brand styling,  and set it to auto-refresh every quarter on the first.

  3. Do people with declining commissions leave our company? Cross-reference 6 months of commission data with departures. Then show me who has declining commission AND lower performance ratings—who should I worry about?

  4. Create a finance close summary for July, including total debit amount, gross pay, net pay, taxes, deductions, and the largest changes from the prior month.

  5. Create a new hire readiness summary for [employee name]’s onboarding, including hire date, manager, department, job title, and pay.

  6. List all employees who left the company in the last 90 days. Include department, title, and last day. Which departments had the most departures?

  7. What's our total accrued PTO across all employees? Which departments carry the most usage?

  8. What's our total annual payroll cost? Break it down by department. Which departments represent the largest share of our personnel expense?

  9. Create an executive workforce summary: total headcount, average tenure, average salary, and breakdown by department and employment type.