How do I connect an outside MCP server to the Votel AI assistant or my AI agents?
An MCP server is simply an integration: an API with a standard format that AI can use. Anything that has an MCP server can be connected, for example SerpAPI for Google search and Google Maps data, Apify for lead scraping, Stripe to check transactions, GitHub to see recent commits, Notion to read and write files, Airtable or Google Drive.
To connect one to the AI assistant:
- Open the AI assistant and go to Assistant settings at the bottom.
- Open Connectors, where the MCP based connectors are listed.
- Click Connect (or add a custom connector) and put in the MCP server URL. Log in to the other service if it asks.
- Choose which of the server's tools to turn on. For example, an Airtable MCP server may offer one tool to search records and another to delete a record; enable only the ones you want.
Once connected, the AI assistant can use those tools in chat, in scheduled tasks and in workers.
To connect one to your AI agents, open the agent's integrations and use the MCP server option. You can give several agents access to the same MCP server.
MCP connections are personal. Votel adds no permission system of its own on top: if the third-party tool limits what the connected user can see, such as certain folders, that limit is respected because the other data is simply not available.
If your own custom app has an MCP server, you can connect it the same way so the AI assistant can control it, for example to manage your Stripe account without logging in to Stripe.