It’s Thursday afternoon and a client emails: “Can you resend the engagement letter, and remind me what we agreed about fees in the March proposal?” You already have Claude open in another tab. Until now, answering meant leaving the chat, finding the right library, opening two PDFs, scrolling for the fee paragraph and typing it all out again.
With Sharedocs connected, you ask Claude instead. It finds the client’s library, reads the proposal, quotes the fee section back to you and gives you a link to the engagement letter. You check it, and reply to your client.
That’s what Connect your AI assistant does. It lets Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants find, read, file and share documents in your Sharedocs libraries, using only what your own account can already see. It works with Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants, and it’s on every plan, Free included.
What connecting an assistant actually means
Sharedocs runs an MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI assistants work with other services. You add one address to your assistant, https://app.sharedocs.net/mcp, and sign in with your normal Sharedocs account. There’s no API key or client ID to copy.
When you sign in, the Sharedocs consent screen asks you to choose:
- Read access: the assistant can look at your libraries and documents, but can’t change anything.
- Read and write access: in libraries where you’re the owner or an admin, it can also add and update documents and invite people.
The assistant sees exactly what you can see in Sharedocs, nothing more (apart from country restrictions, explained below). If one of your collaborators connects their own assistant, it sees only the libraries and documents that collaborator can already see.
How to connect Claude or ChatGPT to your client documents
Every assistant uses the same server address. The steps differ only in where you paste it.
In Claude Code, it takes three steps:
- Run
claude mcp add --transport http sharedocs https://app.sharedocs.net/mcpin your terminal. - In Claude Code, run
/mcp, choose “sharedocs”, and sign in in the browser window that opens. - Approve on the Sharedocs consent screen.
In Claude.ai, open Settings, then Connectors, choose Add, then Add custom connector, and enter the URL https://app.sharedocs.net/mcp. Choose Connect, sign in to Sharedocs and approve. In ChatGPT, you add a custom connector with the same URL, though the menus differ and ChatGPT doesn’t offer custom connectors on its Free plan. We keep the current steps for each assistant on the Connect your AI assistant page, along with Cursor and others.
Three things people actually do with it
Ask what’s in a library
The most common use is simply finding things. Ask “what’s in the Henderson library?” or “which documents in the onboarding folder mention the notice period?” and the assistant can list your libraries, folders and documents, and read the text of PDF and Word (DOCX) documents up to 10 MB.
It can answer questions about a document, compare two of them, or summarise a long contract. When you need the original, it gives you a link to open the document. The link works for 15 minutes.
Owners and admins can also ask who has access to a library, or what’s happened in it recently, because the assistant can list collaborators and read the audit log.
File a summary as a document
Once the assistant has summarised a meeting, a set of documents or a long email thread, you can ask it to file the result in the client’s library. With read and write access, it creates a PDF with headings, lists, simple tables and the library’s name in the footer, and adds it to the library like any other document.
It can also import a file from a public web link (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and common images), rename a document or change its category.
Invite a client
“Invite sarah@example.com to the Henderson library” does what it says. Sarah gets the usual Sharedocs invitation email, exactly as if you’d invited her from the web app. An owner can also ask the assistant to invite an admin (admins are available on Professional and Business).
The honest limits
Some things work differently from a chat, and it’s better to know them up front:
- Uploads from a chat need you to pick the file. Claude.ai and ChatGPT can’t hand a file on your computer to Sharedocs. Instead, the assistant gives you a one-time upload link. You open it, sign in if you need to, and choose the file. The link works for 15 minutes, and the assistant can then check that the upload finished. Assistants that can see your files, like Claude Code and Cursor, upload directly.
- Country restrictions aren’t checked for assistants. Assistants connect from their provider’s servers, not from your location, so a Business library’s country restrictions can’t apply to them. If a library is country-restricted, use its AI assistants setting (below) to decide who can reach it through an assistant.
- Replacing a document needs Personal or above. On Personal, Professional and Business, the assistant can upload a new version of a document. The old version moves to the Archived tab, or both are kept.
- An assistant can’t delete documents. That stays in the web app.
- Scanned documents have no text to read. If a PDF is just images of pages, the assistant says so and offers you the link to open it instead.
- Plan limits apply exactly as they do in the web app. On the Free plan, for example, an assistant can’t take a library past five documents.
Staying in control
Every action an assistant takes is recorded in the library’s audit log, labelled with the assistant’s name, for example “Sharedocs MCP (Claude)”. You can tell which uploads and invitations came from a person and which came from an assistant. We’ve written more about why an audit trail matters when you share documents with clients.
Each library also has an AI assistants setting, under Access Controls in library management:
- Everyone with access (the default): anyone who can see the library can reach it through their assistant.
- Only me: only you can.
- No one: no assistant can reach the library, including yours.
To disconnect an assistant, go to Security Settings and then Connected apps, and revoke it. It stops working on the assistant’s next call. Connections also end on their own: a connection lasts at most 90 days before you sign in again.
Which plan you need
Connecting an assistant is available on every plan, including Free. The library owner’s plan decides what an assistant can do inside a library, in the same way it decides what people can do in the web app. Replacing documents with new versions starts on Personal at £2.99 a month, and country restrictions are part of Business. You can compare everything on the pricing page.