Connect your AI to where the work lives

Before you start

• Use a company account. Connect your business email and files, through the company's paid Claude plan, not a personal login. When someone leaves, the company keeps the access and the work.
• On a Team or Enterprise plan, an owner switches connectors on first. Until an organization Owner enables a connector, it won't appear for anyone else.
• Claude only sees what you can see. A connector uses your own permissions. It can't reach anything you can't.
• Start read-only. By default Claude asks before it takes an action like sending or changing something. Leave that on until you've watched it work.

If you use Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Calendar)

1. In Claude, open Customize → Connectors.
2. Find Gmail and select Connect. Sign in with your business Google account and approve the permissions.
3. Do the same for Google Drive and Google Calendar if you want them. When a connection works, its button changes to Disconnect.
4. In a new chat, click +, hover over Connectors, and make sure the ones you want are switched on.

Official steps: Use Google Workspace connectors.

If you use Microsoft 365 (Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams)

This one needs your Microsoft administrator once. It works with work or school Microsoft 365 accounts, not personal outlook.com or hotmail.com addresses.

1. A Claude owner adds it for the company: Organization settings → Connectors → Add → Microsoft 365.
2. Your Microsoft global administrator approves it once for the whole company. The simplest way: they open Customize → Connectors in Claude, choose Microsoft 365, select Connect, and tick the box to grant access on behalf of the organization.
3. Then each person connects: Customize → Connectors → Microsoft 365 → Connect, and sign in with their work account.

It starts read-only. Sending email or changing files is a separate switch your admin can turn on later. Official steps: Set up the Microsoft 365 connector.

Test it: your first connected task

First, ask about an email you know exists ("Find the last email from my accountant"). If Claude finds it, you're connected. Then try something useful:

Search my inbox for receipts, invoices and renewal notices from software, subscriptions and other recurring services over the last twelve months. For each vendor, tell me how often it bills, what each charge was, and what I'm spending on it per year. Flag anything that looks like a duplicate, a price increase, or something I may have forgotten about.

Then verify, then trust: check three results against the actual receipts before you act on the list.

Give it your house rules (GitHub)

A chatbot forgets everything when the conversation ends. An assistant remembers. The memory is a plain text file about your business that the AI reads every time, kept in a private GitHub repository so every change is recorded and you can switch AI tools without starting over.

1. Create a company account at github.com and a private repository. Add one file (the workbook has a starter page): who you are, what you sell, how you sound, the tools you use, what the AI must never do.
2. In Claude, open Customize → Connectors, choose GitHub Integration, and connect it. Grant access to that repository.
3. Create a Project in Claude for your business work. In its project knowledge, click + → GitHub, pick your repository and the file, and select Add files.
4. Whenever you update the file, click Sync now on it in the project so Claude reads the latest version.
5. Make it a habit: when you and Claude work something out, or it makes a mistake and you find the fix, tell it: "Commit this lesson to memory so we don't make that mistake again." Ask it to write the lesson as one line, paste it into your file, and click Sync now. (In Claude Code, the AI can save it to GitHub itself.) Now every AI that reads the file has learned it.

Official steps: Use the GitHub integration.

Stuck?

Ask Claude. Describe what you're trying to do and where you're stuck, and it will walk you through it. If you'd rather have help, get in touch.