Runbear helps teams onboard AI like a new hire—with help from Pipedream Connect

Snow Lee
Founder & CEO at Runbear

Runbear is changing how non-technical teams adopt AI by making it as intuitive as hiring a new team member. With Runbear, users can create @UniqueAgents inside Slack or Teams, assign them missions, and train them by simply talking—no code required. To make these AI associates truly useful, Runbear needed them to operate like real employees. That meant giving them access to the same tools the team uses daily. Enter Pipedream Connect.

About Runbear

At its core, Runbear is about bringing AI into the flow of work. Rather than relying on prompts or dashboards, users interact with AI through their existing chat platforms. Want to automate reporting, manage workflows, or pull in data from another app? Just tell your agent what you want done, and guide it like you would a new hire. The platform makes AI collaborative and contextual—two qualities that are critical for driving adoption among non-technical users.

The Problem

But to behave like real teammates, AI agents can’t live in a vacuum. Employees need access to company tools—CRMs, project management platforms, calendars, internal databases—and so do their AI counterparts. Without that access, agents would be severely limited in what they could do.

Building these integrations in-house would have been a huge undertaking. Not only would it take months of engineering work to support every tool customers might use, but the maintenance overhead would grow with every new connection. Runbear explored existing solutions like Zapier and Make, but ultimately found that neither fully aligned with their product goals.

The Solution

Pipedream's MCP servers offered a faster, more flexible path—and most importantly, took care of the hard parts. With managed authentication and pre-approved OAuth apps, Runbear didn’t have to spend weeks wrangling with auth flows or standing up secure infrastructure. Instead, they could focus on delivering value to users.

Pipedream’s library of over 10,000 ready-to-use actions across more than 2,500 SaaS applications gave Runbear’s AI agents instant access to the tools their customers rely on. That meant users could onboard an agent and immediately teach it to fetch data from HubSpot, update rows in Airtable, post updates in Asana—whatever their workflow required.

“We allowed users to teach AI how to use tools like a team member seamlessly by supporting MCP integrations,” the team shared. Testing was simple thanks to mcp.pipedream.com, and implementation took just one week. What could have taken months of engineering work was reduced to a few days of setup—without sacrificing reliability or scale.

With Pipedream Connect, Runbear turned what was once a massive integration challenge into a plug-and-play experience. The result? AI agents that don’t just talk—they get real work done.