Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Contractors Cloud uses AI in two distinct ways. Inside the app, individual features use AI to do specific jobs for you — drafting a report from a sentence, or reading an incoming lead and mapping its fields. Separately, Contractors Cloud runs an MCP server, which lets you connect your own AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, or another platform that supports MCP — directly to your Contractors Cloud account. Once connected, you can look up a customer, update a project, schedule work, or run a report by asking for it in plain conversation, and the assistant does the work in your account under your own permissions. This article covers both: what AI does in the product today, and how to connect an assistant of your own.

How Contractors Cloud uses AI in the app

These features are part of Contractors Cloud and need no setup on your part. AI is enabled for every Contractors Cloud account.

Building a report from a description. In Reports, choose Create Report, pick what the report is about, and describe what you want to see. AI drafts the report's columns and filters and shows you a preview — you review it before anything is saved. The example prompts offered on that screen are AI-generated for the record type you picked.
Lead field mapping. On a Lead Connection, add a sample payload — Add sample JSON payload, or Add sample Excel payload to upload a sample spreadsheet — and AI matches the incoming fields to the right Contractors Cloud fields, so you're correcting a proposed mapping instead of building one from scratch.
Creating a lead from plain text. When you create a lead manually, you can type or paste a description in ordinary language — a name, an address, a phone number, who referred them — and AI converts that text into a structured lead, ready to convert into a project.

Connecting your own AI assistant

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI assistants work with outside services securely. Most major AI platforms support it. Contractors Cloud's MCP endpoint is:

https://api.contractorscloud.com/mcp

That endpoint is not a web page. It is the address your AI platform talks to, and it is meant to be pasted into that platform — not opened in a browser. If you do paste it into your address bar you'll get an error such as 405 Method Not Allowed or a short "Unauthenticated" message. That's expected, and it does not mean anything is wrong or that your account lacks access.

Connecting is a one-time setup. On a platform with a connector directory, such as Claude, you find Contractors Cloud there and add it; on other platforms you paste the endpoint above in by hand. Either way you sign in with your normal Contractors Cloud email and password and approve the connection. There are no API keys to create and no developer setup.

Connections are available to standard Contractors Cloud users. System administrator accounts and customer portal (homeowner) accounts cannot connect an assistant.

Quick start — Claude

Contractors Cloud is a listed connector in Claude's connector directory, which is the shortest path:

In Claude, open Settings → Connectors and browse the connector directory. (You can also go straight to the listing at claude.ai/directory/connectors/contractors-cloud.)
Search for Contractors Cloud and click Add.
Sign in with your Contractors Cloud credentials.
Approve the connection. The only permission requested is "Access the MCP server as your user", and you can review it on the approval screen before accepting.

Connectors belong to your Claude account, so one added from the directory also works in the Claude desktop and mobile apps. On a Claude Team or Enterprise plan an organization owner can add it for the whole team from the same listing; individual users on any plan can add it for themselves.

To add it by hand instead, go to Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, enter the endpoint above, click Connect, then sign in and approve.

Other platforms

ChatGPT — open Settings → Connectors and enable developer mode if prompted, choose to add a custom connector or MCP server, enter the endpoint, then sign in and approve.
Claude Code — run claude mcp add --transport http contractors-cloud https://api.contractorscloud.com/mcp in your terminal, enter /mcp in Claude Code, then select contractors-cloud and authenticate.
Cursor — open Settings → MCP, add a new server with the endpoint above and transport set to HTTP, then complete the sign-in prompt in your browser.
Any other platform — any MCP client that supports the streamable HTTP transport and OAuth sign-in can connect with the same endpoint. If your platform reports a redirect or registration error during sign-in, its callback address may not be on our approved list yet; contact Contractors Cloud support and tell us which platform you're using.

What a connected assistant can do

Your assistant works through a set of tools, grouped by the kind of record they touch:

People and teams — look up users and teams by name, so you can say "assign it to Mike Kampa" or "give it to the install crew" without knowing any ids.
Contacts — search contacts, create and update them, and link an existing contact to an account, project, or user.
Customer accounts — search accounts, create and update them.
Projects — search projects, create one with the correct setup options, update an existing one, and add project notes.
Project photos and files — search a project's files and add new ones.
Tasks — search tasks, and create, update, and complete them.
Appointments — search appointments, and schedule or reschedule them with invites to attendees.
Estimates — search estimates and their line items.
Material orders — search material orders, including by reference number or supplier.
Jet Streams — search Jet Streams, start a new one, or reply to an existing one, notifying the people on it.
Inbox mail — search the messages in your inboxes, and look up an inbox's own email address, such as a project's intake address.
Reports — find and run your saved reports, and build a new one when none of them answers the question.
Help and how-to — search and read Contractors Cloud's official help documentation, so your assistant can answer questions about the product itself.

You refer to people, teams, projects, and customers by name, and the assistant looks up whatever internal ids it needs on its own. If a name is ambiguous, it should ask you which one you meant rather than guess.

A few examples of what you can ask:

"Find the customer account for the Hendersons and add a note to their active project."
"Create a task on the Justin Cross project assigned to Mike Kampa — order a dumpster for Monday."
"What roofing projects were created this month? Run my Production Pipeline report."
"Schedule a final walkthrough with the Alvarez job for Thursday at 2pm."
"How do I connect QuickBooks Online to Contractors Cloud?"

The tool list keeps growing

Contractors Cloud adds new MCP tools often. Each release tends to bring either a new record type your assistant can work with or a new action on one it already knows, and the list above is a snapshot rather than a ceiling. You don't have to do anything to pick up new tools: your assistant reads the current list from the MCP server each time it connects, so new capabilities simply appear — no reinstall, no reconnect, no settings to change.

The always-current list, in detail, lives in the Connect your AI agent guide. You can also just ask your assistant what it can do in Contractors Cloud, and it will tell you from the tools it currently has. If a capability you need is missing, tell Contractors Cloud support — requests shape what gets built next.

Reports and analytics

Reporting is how an assistant answers questions about your live data, and it works two ways.

Running a report you already have. Your assistant can find any report you can open in the web app — your own, the ones shared with you, and the out-of-the-box reports — and run it either for a page of rows or for its totals. Totals (sums, averages, counts, minimums, and maximums) are calculated in one pass over every record the report matches, not just the page in front of you, so asking "what's the total" doesn't mean reading through thousands of rows. A report only totals the columns it is already set up to total; on a report you own, your assistant can add a missing sum or average itself.

Building a report when none of yours fits. If no saved report answers the question, your assistant can build one. It looks up what's available to report on — over twenty record types, including projects, invoices, estimates, payments, expenses, bills, tasks, appointments, work orders, material orders, milestones, and permits — along with the columns and filter conditions each one supports, then creates the report, runs it, and adjusts its columns and filters as you refine the question. Date filters can use rolling periods such as "this month" or "this quarter", so a report built once keeps reporting on the current period every time it runs.

Three boundaries are worth knowing:

A report your assistant creates is always private to you. It cannot make one company-wide or share it with a teammate. Visibility, sharing, and a report's KPI cards are managed in the web app, where you can see who the audience actually is.
Out-of-the-box reports cannot be changed by an assistant. To tailor one, make a copy of it in the web app, or ask for a new report with the columns and filters you want.
Cleanup is limited to your own scratch reports. A report built to answer a single question can be deleted once you're done with it, but only if you created it, it is still private, and you haven't shared it — and deletion is permanent. If a one-off report looks worth keeping, say so, and it will sit alongside your other reports in the web app.

What a connected assistant can access

Your assistant acts as you. It signs in with your identity and inherits your exact permissions and your company's data boundaries — it can only see and change what you can see and change. It can never access another company's data, and it cannot do anything your own account could not do in the app.

When you approve the connection, the only permission granted is "Access the MCP server as your user". Nothing else about your account is shared with the AI platform.

Staying in control

Review what your assistant does. It can create and update contacts, accounts, projects, notes, files, tasks, appointments, and reports, and it can start Jet Streams. The only thing it can delete is a report — and only one you created that is still private and unshared, typically a report it just built to answer a question. Nothing else it does can remove a record: no contact, account, project, note, file, task, appointment, Jet Stream, company-wide report, or out-of-the-box report can be deleted through an assistant.
Some actions reach real people. A Jet Stream messages everyone on it, an appointment can email invites to attendees including customers, and assigning a task can notify the assignee. Most AI platforms show you what a tool call is about to do before it runs — keep those confirmations turned on, especially at first. You are responsible for actions your assistant takes as you.
Your permissions are the ceiling. An assistant can never see or do more than your own account allows.
Sign-in doesn't last forever. After you approve the connection your assistant stays signed in automatically for up to 30 days at a time. If it reports that its Contractors Cloud connection has expired, reconnect and approve again.
Disconnect any time. Remove the connector from your AI platform's settings to stop all access. Access also ends on its own if you don't re-approve after the sign-in period expires.

Troubleshooting

The endpoint shows an error in your browser — "405 Method Not Allowed", "Unauthenticated", or a blank page. Nothing is broken. The endpoint is not a web page and has nothing to display; it only answers AI platforms that connect to it over MCP. Paste it into your AI platform instead of your address bar.
"...available to standard users only" (403). You are connecting with a system administrator or customer portal account. Connect with your regular Contractors Cloud user instead.
The sign-in page never appears. Check that the endpoint is exactly https://api.contractorscloud.com/mcp, and that your platform supports remote MCP servers with OAuth sign-in.
A redirect or registration error during sign-in. Your platform's callback address isn't on our approved list yet. Contact Contractors Cloud support and tell us which platform you're using.
Your assistant says the connection expired. Reconnect from your platform's connector settings; you'll sign in and approve again.
A tool call fails. Wait a minute and try again. If it keeps failing, contact Contractors Cloud support with the approximate time and what your assistant was doing.

For developers

Everything the MCP server does sits on top of the Contractors Cloud REST API, which is documented at api.contractorscloud.com/docs. If you're building an integration rather than connecting an assistant, start there; API access tokens are created in Contractors Cloud under Integrations → API Access Tokens.

The documentation itself is also published as a second, read-only MCP server at https://api.contractorscloud.com/docs/mcp. Coding assistants such as Claude Code and Cursor can point at it to search and read every page of the API reference while you build. It requires no account and no authentication, and it only reads documentation — it has no access to any Contractors Cloud data. Like the endpoint above, it is an address for your assistant, not a page to open in a browser.