If you design SurveyCTO forms, are interested in customizing the look and functionality of your survey fields, or manage data collection workflows, this session is built for you.
In this webinar, SurveyCTO Director of Enterprise Success, Amrik Cooper, and President & CEO, Lawrence Li walk you through how our AI agent skill paired with the MCP server can greatly simplify the survey design and workflow creation process.
Watch to learn about:
- A primer on AI agent skills and MCP servers
- How to set up and use our agent skill and MCP server together
- Live demos showing the skill and MCP server creating a field plug-in and a form in minutes
- Insights into the SurveyCTO roadmap
Key webinar takeaways
- The SurveyCTO agent skill transforms a generic AI agent into a SurveyCTO specialist: Without it, the agent’s response may be imprecise or even wrong when you try to apply it in the SurveyCTO context.
- The MCP server bridges the gap between advice and action: Pairing the skill and MCP together enables an AI agent to not only become a SurveyCTO specialist, but also implement high-quality actions on your behalf. An agent just with the skill may be able to create a generic form for you, but that form might include inconsistencies, resulting in an invalid form design. An agent with the skill and MCP server would not only be able to create forms and field plug-ins for you, those forms and plug-ins don’t need extra adjustments to make them work in the SurveyCTO platform later on.
- Choosing a “smarter” model like Claude Opus may save you time and money in the long run: Defaulting to a fast, cheap model on complex tasks can cost you more in rework than the tokens you saved.
- Use AI agents as a thought partner, not a vending machine: Ask it to question your assumptions, stress-test your plan, and segment work into testable milestones before you commit to a final output.
- Building on a governed platform like SurveyCTO protects you from the security risks of vibe coding from scratch: Because any outputs from the skill and MCP must eventually be deployed on the SurveyCTO platform, you get the benefit of vibe coding (i.e. creating solutions using natural language) and SurveyCTO’s security infrastructure.
- Explore how to use the skill as an on-demand tutor: Try dropping in forms built by more experienced colleagues and ask the agent to explain how they work or turning existing assets into a practical SurveyCTO learning resource.
Time stamps
- 3:51 – Timeline of data collection transformation
- 5:37 – Primer on AI agent skills
- 6:39 – Primer on MCP servers
- 7:50 – Introduction to the SurveyCTO AI agent skill and MCP server workflow
- 10:40 – Examples of how you can use the skill and MCP server
- 15:05 – Demo – setting up the skill and MCP server
- 20:31 – Demo – creating a field plug-in
- 27:10 – Demo – creating a form
- 34:56 – Demo – uploading created field plug-in to SurveyCTO
- 39:15 – Demo – uploading created form to SurveyCTO
- 43:50 – Tips for using AI effectively
- 47:05 – SurveyCTO roadmap insights
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a paid subscription to Claude Code, Claude Cowork, or OpenAI Codex to use the SurveyCTO skill and MCP?
You do not! You can be on the free plan of Claude or ChatGPT and still use the SurveyCTO skill and MCP. However, you will need to sign up or log into the AI agent in order to use the skill and MCP. Additionally, using the most current, strongest models like Claude Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.5 likely requires you to be on a paid plan.
The SurveyCTO skill is designed to be transferable across a wide variety of agents, but we do not build or host these external AI agents and therefore do not control their pricing models, terms of use, or constraints.
Ultimately, whether you need to pay depends entirely on the specific agent provider or model you choose to use.
Can the SurveyCTO skill and MCP translate an existing paper survey form (in word or PDF) into a SurveyCTO form? If so, how well does it handle complexity (multiple modules, rosters, etc.)?
Yes it can. Keep in mind that the output is always a starting draft that requires your review, not a finished form.
The agent reads the uploaded document (Word, PDF, or scanned paper form), interprets the question structure, and uses the SurveyCTO MCP to build a proper XLSForm from the official template. It will ask you about ambiguities before building, then deliver a downloadable XLSForm.
It handles complexity well, including:
- Multiple modules/sections
- Rosters
- Multiple and nested rosters
- Skip logic, constraints, cascading selects, and choice lists—all translated to SurveyCTO expression syntax
Note:
- Logic that lives only in enumerator training won’t be visible in the document and won’t be converted
- Complex and/or conditions should be verified in the form designer testing interface
- Very large forms (200+ questions) may need to be broken into modules across sessions
- Scanned/photographed forms are only as good as the image quality
How does SurveyCTO plan to help troubleshoot issues with user-generated apps using the skill and MCP?
If you’ve built field plug-ins:
- Because those AI-generated plug-ins are built for your specific workflow and not officially developed or maintained by SurveyCTO, we aren’t able to review or troubleshoot them directly. However, the great thing about using the AI skill is that the agent itself becomes an excellent debugger. We highly recommend pasting the error you are seeing (or describing the issue) right back into your chat with the AI agent and asking it to provide a solution.
- If your needs go beyond what the agent can troubleshoot, you can commission our Professional Services team for help.
If you need help with forms:
- Paid and trial users can always take advantage of our 24/7 Customer Support team by submitting a ticket in our Support Center.
- Community users can request support from our Community Forum from other users or try engaging with either the external AI agent or our AI assistant (found on every page of our website in the lower right corner).
How do we get the latest updates to the skill and how do we install those updates?
Whenever you use our skill in a chat, we check the version you currently have installed. If it is out of date, the skill notifies you that a newer version is available. You can then download the updated skill in GitHub.
To install the new version of the skill, you can simply:
- Navigate to where you added the skill in the first place by clicking Customize, and then Skills.
- Go to the SurveyCTO skill and click the vertical ellipsis in the upper right corner next to the Share toggle button.
- Click Replace and upload the newly-updated skill.
You do not need to delete the current skill first. (Note: We’ve mainly tested this using Claude Desktop so your experience may differ on ChatGPT or other AI agents.)
Can the skill and MCP be used to create dummy forms?
Absolutely. Simply ask the agent to create a test form for you in your initial prompt and it will generate one for you in its response.
I have specific questions I want to use when working with the AI agent. How do I make sure the agent incorporates those questions when assisting me?
If you already have questions in mind, there are a couple of ways you can make sure the agent incorporates those questions when assisting you:
- You can upload your form definition or list of questions into the desktop AI agent and send as part of your prompt in which you instruct it to reference your questions. The agent will then understand it should reference your questions in its response.
- You can also copy and paste the questions directly into the chat and also send it as part of your prompt.
Webinar resources
New to SurveyCTO? Sign up for a free trial today to explore our solution and make use of our field plug-ins for a better survey experience. During the 15-day trial, you’ll have access to the entire platform.
