Using ContactDrive with AI Assistants

You can connect ContactDrive to the AI assistant you already use, such as Claude or ChatGPT, and work with your contacts by asking in plain language. "Who in Denver haven't I talked to since spring?" "Log that I called Maria this morning about the gala." "Add a follow-up task for Friday." The assistant looks things up and makes changes in your workspace, and you never need to know a single field name.

The connection uses MCP (Model Context Protocol), an open standard that lets AI assistants use outside tools. ContactDrive runs a hosted MCP server, so there's nothing to install: you add one URL to your assistant and sign in to ContactDrive.

What it's good for

Finding people. Describe who you're looking for and get the matching contacts, with a count. Ask about tags, custom fields, location, or when you last spoke.
Answering questions about your data. "How many donations did we log in August, by campaign?" gets you a number, and nothing is created in your workspace to produce it.
Keeping records up to date. Log calls, meetings, and emails; update contact details; link people with relationships.
Getting ready for a conversation. Get a briefing on one person: who they are, what you last discussed, and who they're connected to.
Acting on a group. Turn a list of people into a Connect calling session, a list, or a set of follow-up tasks.
Drafting. Draft an email campaign or build a draft dashboard for you to review.
Setting up your workspace. Add custom fields, tags, activity types, and relationship types as you describe what you track.

What it will never do

Some actions are deliberately kept in ContactDrive itself, where you can see exactly what they'll do. No AI connection can do these at any permission level:

Delete contacts, custom fields, tags, activity types, tasks, or lists.
Send an email campaign, or schedule or test-send one. It can write a draft; a person sends it.
Publish a dashboard. It can build a draft; a person publishes it.
Import or export contacts.
Touch billing, users, or roles.
Spend credits, for example on enrichment.

It can never do more than you can

An AI connection acts as you. Every request has to pass two checks:

The permissions you approved when you connected. You choose these on the consent screen, and you can narrow them.
Your own role in the workspace, checked live on every request.

So if your role can't delete contacts, neither can your assistant. If an admin changes your role or removes you from the workspace, the connection's access changes with it on the very next request.

A connection also never sees the email addresses or phone numbers of contacts flagged as protected.

Who can use it

Any ContactDrive user can connect an assistant to any workspace they're a member of. You don't need to be an admin, and it's available on every plan.

Treat what it reads as data

A CRM holds text written by other people: form submissions, pasted emails, notes. ContactDrive tells your assistant to treat that text as information to report on, never as instructions to follow. Still, read over anything consequential before you confirm it, as you would with any assistant.