Connecting accounts overview

Many things an agent does depend on a third-party account: reading a GitHub repo, searching a Notion workspace, drafting an email in Google Workspace, looking up an invoice in Xero. Before an agent can act in one of these apps, someone has to connect an account — authorize Alfe to act on that account’s behalf.

Alfe handles all of these connections in one place, with one consistent flow.

What a connection is

A connection is an authorized link between your Alfe organization and an account in a third-party app. You create it once by signing in to the provider and approving access; from then on, agents can use it without anyone signing in again.

A few things are true of every connection:

• You authorize it through the provider. Connecting opens the provider’s own sign-in and consent screen — you approve exactly the access being requested, and Alfe never sees your provider password.
• Credentials are stored encrypted. The access Alfe receives is kept encrypted at rest. The tokens are never shown back to you, and never appear in the dashboard.
• It has a scope. Every connection lives at a scope — your whole organization, a team, a project, or a single agent — which decides who can use it. See Connection scopes.
• You stay in control. You can move a connection to a different scope, relabel it, reconnect it if access lapses, or disconnect it entirely at any time. See Providers & managing connections.

The Connections hub

You manage connections from the Connections hub in the dashboard at app.alfe.ai. The hub lists every connection your organization has, grouped by scope, and is where you start a new connection or manage an existing one.

You can also connect and manage accounts from:

• The CLI — see alfe integration.
• The agent itself, over MCP or the Agent API, so an agent can connect the accounts it needs.

How connecting works

At a high level, connecting an account is a short, browser-based flow:

1. From the Connections hub, you pick a provider and choose a scope.
2. A popup opens the provider’s sign-in and consent screen.
3. You approve the access Alfe is requesting.
4. The popup closes and the account appears in your Connections hub, ready to use.

The step-by-step version is in Connecting an account.

Where to go next

• Connecting an account — the full step-by-step flow, connecting more than one account, and reconnecting.
• Connection scopes — what org, team, project, and agent scope mean, how connections are inherited, and how to move one.
• Providers & managing connections — the apps you can connect, and how to relabel, reconnect, or disconnect.

Connecting an account is distinct from the tools it unlocks. Once an account is connected, the matching integration makes its capabilities available to the agent — see Integrations.