Connectors for AI agents

by
Joost Schouten
Co-founder and Circle Lead at Nestr
Published on
August 29, 2026

Connectors give an AI agent governed access to the systems your organisation already runs on: mail, calendars, documents, code, tickets, CRM and accounting. They are what turns an agent from something that can only talk about your work into something that can do it.

The design principle is simple. Nobody shares a credential with an agent. An admin decides which data sources exist and how broadly they may be owned. Governance decides which roles get them. The secret itself lives in an external vault, never reaches the agent, and every use is recorded. That is what makes agent access to third-party data an enterprise-grade decision your organisation can audit and revoke, rather than an API key pasted into a prompt.

The connector catalogue

Nestr ships ready-made connectors for the tools most organisations already use. Adding one is a matter of picking a tile: the endpoint, the transport, the authentication method and the OAuth client all come with it, so there is nothing to research or paste in.

Google Workspace

  • Gmail read and send mail
  • Google Drive search and read files
  • Google Calendar read and manage events
  • Google Docs read and edit documents
  • Google Sheets read and write spreadsheets
  • Google Tasks read and manage task lists
  • Google Analytics run reports on a GA4 property
  • Google Search Console search traffic for verified sites

Microsoft 365

  • Outlook Mail read and send mail
  • Outlook Calendar read and manage events
  • OneDrive search OneDrive and SharePoint
  • Microsoft Teams read chats and post messages

Work management and engineering

  • Slack channels, messages and people
  • GitHub issues, pull requests and code
  • GitLab repositories, issues and merge requests
  • Jira & Confluence issues, boards and pages
  • Linear issues, projects and cycles
  • Asana tasks and projects
  • Monday.com boards, items and updates
  • ClickUp tasks, lists and docs
  • Notion pages and databases
  • Sentry errors and releases

Finance, sales and support

  • Stripe payments, customers and invoices
  • Xero accounting, invoices and reports
  • QuickBooks accounting, invoices and reports
  • Moneybird accounting, invoices and contacts
  • HubSpot contacts, companies and deals
  • Intercom conversations and contacts

Files and automation

  • Dropbox files and folders
  • Box files and folders
  • Zapier run actions in connected apps
  • Make scenarios and connected apps

A few connectors need an OAuth client that your deployment supplies. Those appear once an admin has configured one, so the tiles you see are the connectors your workspace can add right now.

Choose any from our pre-configured connectors are add your custom connectors.
Choose any from our pre-configured connectors are add your custom connectors.

Custom connectors

The catalogue is a convenience, not a boundary. You can register a custom connector against any HTTP API or any Model Context Protocol server your organisation runs, including internal systems that will never appear in anyone's catalogue.

A custom connector carries the same governance as a ready-made one: the same ownership model, exposure controls, vaulted credentials and usage record. Registering one is an admin action, and it is where you point Nestr at your own ERP, data warehouse or in-house service.

How access is granted

Connector access is a double gate, and the two halves answer different questions.

  • Admins decide what exists. Registering a connector puts it in the workspace catalogue and sets its exposure: whether it may be owned by a role domain, and whether it may be held personally by a person or an agent.
  • Governance decides who gets it. Anyone who may edit a role's domain can give that domain access to a connector the admin has already opened to domains. That is an ordinary governance act, visible and revisable like any other.

This is deliberately not one permissions screen. Deciding the organisation may reach Xero at all is a different decision from deciding which role reaches it, and different people should make them.

Who a connection can belong to

  • A role domain. The connector belongs to the role, and whoever fills that role reaches it, human or agent. This is the one to reach for: authority follows the role, so it survives the filler changing.
  • The workspace. Available across the workspace, for genuinely shared sources.
  • A person. Your own account, reachable by an assistant acting for you and nobody else.
  • An agent. Held by a named agent for its own work.

Exposure is re-checked every time a credential is handed out, not only when access is granted. An admin who switches a connector off for role domains stops it flowing through bindings that already exist, rather than merely blocking new ones.

A connector can be granted to roles, users, agents or everyone in the workspace or a combination of those options..
A connector can be granted to roles, users, agents or everyone in the workspace or a combination of those options.

Connecting an account

Granting access does not connect anything. The person whose account it is still has to sign in, and that consent is theirs to give.

  1. An admin registers the connector, or picks it from the catalogue.
  2. Access is bound to a role domain, the workspace, a person or an agent.
  3. Nestr produces a connect link. Opening it takes you to the vendor's own sign-in and consent screen.
  4. You approve the scopes the connector asks for. Nestr records which host you consented to and which scopes you granted.

Only the resulting tokens are kept, in an external secrets vault. They are never stored in the Nestr database and never travel to the agent. When an agent needs a connector, it receives a single-use handle rather than a secret, redeems it at the moment of use, and the exchange is written to a usage ledger.

A role filler (or workspace admin) will be able to authenticate the connector through a simple 'connect' click.
A role filler (or workspace admin) will be able to authenticate the connector through a simple 'connect' click.

When connecting, simply follow the prompts by the 3rd party to authorise access.
When connecting, simply follow the prompts by the 3rd party to authorise access.

Letting Nestradamus set it up

You do not have to do any of this from the settings screens. Ask the assistant in plain language and it will walk the setup with you:

Can you set up a Gmail connector for our Sales role?

It will find the right template rather than guessing at an endpoint, ask who should have access, register the connector, bind it, and hand you back the connect link to sign in with. If a connector already exists it will say so instead of creating a second one.

The assistant works within your permissions here as everywhere else. If you are not a workspace admin it can prepare the request and tell you who can approve it, but it cannot grant access you do not have. See Nestradamus.

Our support bot Nestradamus can help you with the full setup of your agents and connectors. Simply ask.
Our support bot Nestradamus can help you with the full setup of your agents and connectors. Simply ask.

Human approval for sensitive actions

A connector can require a person to approve before an agent acts. The policy is set per connector: approve nothing, approve writes, or approve everything. You can also name specific operations that always need a person.

When an agent hits a gated action it pauses and asks in the conversation, naming what it wants to do. Somebody with the authority to answer approves or declines, and the run resumes from there. The agent does not proceed on silence.

This is human-in-the-loop control in practical form: not a blanket switch, but a per-connector dial you turn up where a mistake is expensive and leave off where it is not.

What gets recorded

Every credential handout is written to a usage ledger: which agent, which connector, on whose authority, and when. Combined with governance lookback, that gives you two complementary histories: what changed in your organisation, and what your agents reached outside it.

This matters beyond good practice. If you are working towards EU AI Act obligations, traceability and human oversight are not features you add at the end, and role-scoped access with a per-use record is most of what an audit asks for.

Revoking access

Access can be withdrawn at three levels, and each takes effect immediately:

  • Disconnect the account. The stored tokens are deleted from the vault. The binding remains, so reconnecting is a sign-in rather than a fresh setup.
  • Remove the binding. The role, person or agent loses the connector.
  • Change or disable the connector. Narrow its exposure or switch it off in the catalogue, and it stops flowing through every binding already made.

Because a role-domain connector belongs to the role rather than to a person, someone leaving a role loses that access as a consequence of governance, with nothing to remember to revoke.

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