Connect your AI (MCP)

You can connect the AI assistant you already use so that it works directly with your Instasent project. Instead of clicking through the dashboard and copying figures out of it, you ask in your own words: "how many customers ordered before but not in the last three months?", "draft a campaign for that group".

It works because Instasent runs an MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard assistants use to plug into other tools; in practice it is the shared language that lets yours understand your project. The model is yours — you connect it, and it keeps running wherever you already use it.

Which one are you using?

Setting it up is different depending on where your assistant lives, so start here and follow only your half.

Web assistants: ChatGPT and Claude

1. 1

   Give your assistant the address

   Wherever it asks you to add an MCP server or a custom connector, paste this URL:

   https://develop-mcp.instasent.com/mcp

   That is the whole configuration: no keys, no files, nothing to install. The name you give it is only so you recognise it in your own list — call it whatever you like.

2. 2

   Log in and approve

   Your assistant sends you to an Instasent screen. You sign in, see who is asking, which permissions and for which project, and approve. Your password never reaches the assistant.

3. 3

   Turn it on in the conversation

   Most assistants keep connectors off by default in each new chat. Enable Instasent from the conversation's tools or connectors menu, and start asking.

Instasent Skills, in a web assistant

Instasent Skills are how Instasent's operating knowledge reaches your assistant: how an audience filter is written so it doesn't quietly select nobody, what a message really costs once its encoding is counted, which figures are approximations and must not be quoted as exact.

You already have them. The connection serves them live, and your assistant reaches for them on its own — there is nothing to install for it to work. What follows is only for keeping a copy loaded permanently.

In Claude, go to Customize → Skills, choose Upload a skill and pick that file.

Other assistants add knowledge in their own ways, and those ways change often. Rather than guess for you, ask yours — paste this:

Instasent publishes its product knowledge — Instasent Skills — as an Agent
Skill, a folder of markdown files. I can download it as a zip from:
https://develop-mcp.instasent.com/.well-known/skills/instasent-skills.zip
 
Two things:
 
1. Can you load knowledge like that — a skill, a knowledge file, a project
   file, anything equivalent? If you can, tell me exactly where in your
   interface I upload it. If you can't, say so plainly and don't improvise
   a workaround.
 
2. Either way, commit this to memory for our future conversations: the same
   knowledge is available live from the Instasent connector, through its
   get_playbook tool. Before answering anything about Instasent — how an
   audience filter is written, what a message costs, what a figure includes
   — call get_playbook and answer from that, rather than from what you
   already believe about the platform. Save that instruction to your memory
   now.

Coding assistants: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI

These can set themselves up. Paste this and let your assistant do the whole thing — the connection and Instasent Skills, in one go:

Set Instasent CDP up in this project. Run the commands yourself rather than
asking me to run them.
 
1. Check whether the Instasent MCP server is already configured, and add it
   if it isn't. It is a remote server speaking Streamable HTTP at
   https://develop-mcp.instasent.com/mcp — there are no keys, the URL is the whole configuration.
   In Claude Code that is:
     claude mcp add --transport http instasent https://develop-mcp.instasent.com/mcp
   In another assistant, add that same URL to your MCP config file.
 
2. Check whether Instasent Skills are already installed, and install them
   if they aren't:
     npx skills add https://staging-instasent-docs-nextjs.oscar-284.workers.dev
 
Then stop and tell me three things: what it covers, after reading the
SKILL.md you installed; what I have to do to finish signing in; and whether
this session has to be restarted before the Instasent tools show up.

That closing instruction is doing real work. Signing in is yours — it opens a browser and only you can approve it — and most assistants only notice a new MCP server on their next session. Asking your assistant to tell you both saves you finding out by silence.

claude mcp add --transport http instasent https://develop-mcp.instasent.com/mcp

npx skills add https://staging-instasent-docs-nextjs.oscar-284.workers.dev

unzip -o instasent-skills.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

rm -rf .agents/skills/instasent-cdp

claude mcp remove instasent-cdp

What a connected assistant does

It works with a curated set of tools, not with the whole API. In practice it can look at your project the way you would and describe what it finds: who is in your audience and how many match a condition, what you have been sending and how it went, what your automations do, and what your project can send today. It can also leave work prepared — a segment saved from the audience you just defined together, a campaign written and left as a draft — and it can read this documentation on its own, so it answers questions about Instasent without you pasting links.

The exact list grows and changes with each release, so the honest way to think about it is by shape: it reads your project and prepares work; it does not carry it out.

What it never does

It doesn't import your contacts or export your list either. That lives in the API, for integrations that carry their own credentials — see API tokens.

Checking it works

The honest test isn't listing a directory, it's asking for something only a connected assistant could answer:

"Recommend a winback segment for my store, and tell me how many contacts it would have."

A good answer comes back with a concrete proposal and a number from your project — customers who ordered before but not since a certain date, counted. If instead you get general advice about winback campaigns and no number, it isn't connected.

That question is a good test precisely because it needs both halves: your data for the count, and Instasent Skills to build the segment the way this platform actually stores that — recency lives on the contact, not in the events.

Staying in control

• The connection reaches only the project you chose and only the permissions you approved.
• Your project's access type applies on top of that, and can hold back or anonymize personal data: an assistant can end up able to count an audience without being able to see who is in it. See Data access.
• Every connected assistant appears in Connected apps with its permissions, and you can disconnect it at any time. It loses access immediately.

Building your own app or agent on top of Instasent, for other customers to install? That is the developer side: Connected apps (OAuth).