Connect your own AI (ChatGPT, Claude)
Let an AI you already pay for look things up in Sign OS.
What this is for
If your shop already uses ChatGPT, Claude or a similar assistant, you can let it read your Sign OS data and answer questions about your shop — 'what did we quote Bunnings for the pylon sign?', 'which jobs are behind this week?'. You create a connection key, paste it into that assistant once, and tick exactly which parts of your business it may look at. This is only for outside AI: the built-in ReAct assistant already works and needs none of it.
Before you start
- You are signed in as an admin.
- You already have an AI assistant that supports MCP connections (most do — check its settings for 'MCP' or 'connectors').
Step by step
- 1
Open Settings → Connect your own AI. Read the two notices at the top before you set anything up.
Note: Connections are read-only, always. An outside AI can never create or edit a quote, move a job, raise an invoice, or delete anything. The only risk here is what it can see.
- 2
Under 'Step 1 — Set up the connection', give the key a name you'll recognise later, like 'My ChatGPT' or 'Dave's Claude'.
- 3
Still in Step 1, choose 'Treat it like which staff member?'. The AI sees exactly what someone in that role sees and no more, so pick the lowest role that still answers your questions — Sales, for instance, sees sell prices but not your cost or margin.
- 4
Under 'Step 2 — What is it allowed to look at?', tick the areas this AI may read. Anything you leave unticked is invisible to it.
Note: Areas marked with an amber ⚠ expose money or people's details — Quotes shows your margin, Stock & suppliers shows your buy prices, Catalogue & rates is the pricing formula behind every quote you send, and Customers sends your customers' contact details out. Tick the fewest areas that make the assistant useful.
- 5
Click Create connection key. The key appears once and is never shown again — copy it straight away.
- 6
Under 'Step 3 — Paste it into your AI', click Copy address and paste that web address into your assistant, then paste the key as the Bearer token. If the app asks what kind of connection this is, the answer is MCP (Model Context Protocol).
- 7
Ask your assistant a question about your shop to confirm it works. The connection then shows under 'Your connections' with the areas it can read and when it was last used.
Tips & gotchas
- Whatever you allow is sent to whoever runs that AI — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — every time it answers a question. That is their servers, under their terms, not Sign OS's. Decide what leaves the shop on purpose.
- Never post the key anywhere public: not a forum, a Facebook group, a support ticket, a screenshot, or a public code repository. Anyone who reads it can pull your data from anywhere in the world without ever logging in to Sign OS, and you won't see them doing it. The web address is harmless to share — the key is the part that matters.
- Give each person their own key rather than passing one around, so you can turn theirs off without breaking everyone else's.
- Start small. Tick two or three areas, live with it for a week, and make a second key with more access later if you actually need it.
- Turning a key off takes effect immediately — the assistant goes blind straight away. There's no undo, so you'd create a new key and paste it in again.
- Lost the key or never copied it? You can't get it back. Turn that connection off and create a new one.