MCP Connectors – TextCortex Help Center

What Are Connectors?

Connectors are the integrations that give your AI access to the tools and data your team already uses.

Without them, the AI works from whatever you paste into the chat. With them, it reads and writes directly from the source.

How Connectors Work

When you activate a connector, you give the AI permission to interact with a specific platform during a session.

Connectors started as read tools: pull a ticket, fetch a contact, check a deal status. They're becoming much more than that. Write tools mean your AI can now take action directly inside the platforms where your team works: draft a support ticket, create a task, update a deal stage, post a summary, log a note. No tab-switching, no copy-pasting.

Connectors and Skills

A connector opens a door. A skill decides what to do once the door is open.

The same Asana connector can power a sprint setup skill, a task summary skill, and a deadline tracker skill. The connector handles access. The skill handles logic. See [What Are Skills?](article-skills.md) for how workflows get encoded.

Common Connectors and What They Enable

Google Drive

A Google Drive connector lets the AI search, read, upload, move, copy, and organize files directly from chat. Ask it to find last quarter's proposal, pull a specific doc into context before drafting a response, or organize files into folders. No opening Drive in a separate tab.

Outlook

An Outlook connector gives the AI access to your inbox and calendar. It can read and send emails, search inbox history, and manage calendar events. A meeting prep skill uses it to pull relevant email threads and upcoming events before a call. A follow-up skill uses it to draft and send replies directly.

Notion

A Notion connector lets the AI read and write pages, databases, and docs. A project kickoff skill uses it to create briefs and populate templates. A knowledge base skill uses it to search internal docs and pull relevant context before drafting a reply.

Slack

A Slack connector lets the AI post updates, summaries, and alerts to specific channels. Most workflow skills end with a Slack step: the project kickoff summary goes to #projects, the weekly support digest goes to #support-ops, the SEO report goes to #marketing.

Jira

A Jira connector lets the AI read and act on issues, epics, and sprints. An engineering triage skill uses it to pull open bugs by severity, flag anything unassigned past a threshold, and surface blockers before the standup.

Zendesk

A Zendesk connector gives the AI access to tickets, customer history, and tags. A support skill uses it to pull open tickets, filter by urgency, and draft replies based on issue type.

Klaviyo

A Klaviyo connector lets the AI read segments, check campaign performance, and draft email flows. An email marketing skill uses it to pull a target segment, check suppression lists, and produce a sequence with copy, subject lines, and send timing.

HubSpot / Salesforce

A CRM connector is the backbone of most sales skills. It lets the AI check whether a company is already a customer, find open deals, look up contact ownership, and filter prospecting lists before anything reaches an SDR. Sending outbound to an existing customer is the kind of mistake that only happens once, and a CRM connector prevents it.

Apollo

An Apollo connector gives the AI access to contact and company data for outbound prospecting. A sales skill uses it to search for accounts by industry and size, enrich contacts with email and role data, and score leads by intent signals before cross-checking them against the CRM.

Chaining Multiple Connectors

Skills often chain 2 or 3 connectors in sequence. A project kickoff skill might write a brief to Notion, build the task tree in Asana, and post a summary to Slack.

A prospecting skill might search Apollo, filter through HubSpot, and export to a formatted list.

The skill defines the sequence. Each connector just does its part when called.

Advanced Connector Use

As skills get more specialized, connectors do heavier work.

An SEO audit skill might call an analytics platform for domain metrics, pull ranking data for 200 keywords, identify traffic-losing pages over 90 days, and write a full HTML report, all in one session.

A content research skill might query a CMS across 1,000+ posts, run 5 parallel keyword research queries, and check competitor rankings, chaining a CMS connector, an SEO connector, and a file output.

The connectors are the same ones you already activated. The skill just asks more of them.

Custom MCP Server: Add Any Tool

If we don't support a tool your team relies on, you don't have to wait for us to build it.

Our Custom MCP Connector framework lets you connect any third-party system's MCP server to TextCortex yourself.

If your industry runs on a niche CRM, an internal tool, or anything not on our standard list, you can wire it in directly. Once connected, it works like any other MCP connector: your skills can call it, read from it, and write to it.

A note on security: Custom connectors require API keys or authentication credentials from the third-party system you're connecting. Treat these like passwords. Never share them, don't paste them into chat, and store them in a secure location (a password manager or secrets vault, not a spreadsheet). If a key is compromised, revoke it immediately from the third-party platform and generate a new one. TextCortex does not have access to your credentials and cannot recover them if lost.

Setting Up a Connector & Managing Permissions

Connector permissions can be configured on within the conversation by going to Tools -> Connectors, or through your TextCortex settings in the Integrations permissions section.

Each connector guides you through the login process (typically using OAuth or an API key) and defines what the AI is allowed to access.

Once active, any skill that references it works automatically.

To see how connectors get wired into workflows, read Skills.