Give Claude the Keys, Safely

Your team already uses AI assistants. Watch how: they open the CRM, copy a customer's history, paste it into ChatGPT, ask a question, then copy the answer back. The assistant is clever. It just can't see anything.

The two bad options

The first is to keep pasting. It's slow, it leaks data into chat histories, and the answers are only as good as whatever someone remembered to copy. The second is to give an agent your database password and hope. Engineers lose sleep over that one, and they're right to.

MCP: a door with a lock

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for AI assistants to call tools. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and a growing list of others support it. An MCP server sits between those assistants and your systems and decides exactly what they're allowed to do. When I build one, these are the rules:

Each tool does one job. "Find unpaid invoices for a customer", never "run any SQL query".
Read-only by default. Anything that writes, refunds, sends or deletes asks a person to confirm first.
Scoped to the user. The assistant sees what the person using it is allowed to see, and nothing else.
Logged. Every call is recorded: who asked, which tool ran, which data came back.
One server for every client. Build it once and every MCP-compatible assistant on your team can use it.

What people ask it

Which invoices over $5,000 are unpaid this month? What did we promise this customer on the last three calls? Draft a reply to this ticket using our refund policy. The assistant answers from your systems instead of guessing, and the log shows exactly what it looked at.

For your customers too

The same principle works in public. An AI knowledge chatbot answers visitors from your own documents only, links the source for every answer, and passes questions it can't answer to a person, who can turn them into new FAQ entries. It has nothing else to answer from, so it can't make things up about your business.

Useful AI needs access. Safe AI needs limits. An MCP server gives you both.

What it costs

A Custom MCP Server starts at $450 for a read-only server with up to four tools over one data source, in six days. Confirmed write actions, authentication and remote hosting come with the $1,200 package. The AI Knowledge Chatbot starts at $220.

Tell me about your business and I'll tell you what I'd build first: start here or book a free call.