Brief connects to your email, calendar and chat directly, and keeps your task manager in sync. Most of your work also lives somewhere else: a spreadsheet that drives a process, a CRM record, a meeting transcript from a notetaker. Brief cannot see any of it, and the things you most want it to act on are often in exactly those places.
MCP closes that gap. Register an MCP server under Settings → Connections and the systems behind it become available in the Ask Brief chat. You can ask about what is in them, and ask Brief to update them. Most systems that publish their own hosted MCP server connect the same way, as Connecting Brief to any MCP server describes.
Composio is the easiest place to start. It is an MCP service that connects to hundreds of business systems and exposes them as tools an assistant can call. Connect Composio once, and every system you link there arrives through that single connection.
The list is long and includes Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Zoho, HubSpot, Clay, Notion, Read.ai and Fathom.
This Use Composio MCP to connect to Google Drive How to video is worth watching once before you do it. It takes you through the setup of Composio within Brief for connecting to Google Drive.
What this lets Brief do
Agent tools bring your other systems into Brief. The Brief MCP server runs the other way: it lets an outside assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude reach your Brief context from wherever you are already working.
Once a system is connected, you ask for what you need in chat, and Brief reads it alongside your email, meetings and commitments. A few examples:
Read your tracking documents against what people said. The leadership tracker, the capital projects list, the board pack. Brief reads the workbook and checks it against the email and meetings it already holds.
Open the leadership action tracker in SharePoint, compare it with what people actually said in email and meetings this week, and tell me which rows are wrong.
Update them. Brief writes the change straight into the file or the record, so enable only the write tools you mean to allow.
Update the status column in that tracker for the three rows you just confirmed are done.
Check your CRM and support queue. Salesforce, HubSpot or Zendesk, read against the promises in your email.
Which of my open deals has a promise from us that's overdue?
Pull a meeting transcript. Ask for a recording from Fathom, Read.ai or Teams and Brief lists what was promised and by whom. It reads the transcript when you ask. It does not add those commitments to your records on its own the way it does with your email.
Pull the last three Fathom recordings with the Hartwell site team and tell me what was promised and by whom.
What it cannot do yet. Outside systems are available in chat and not to agents. An agent cannot read a workbook on a schedule or tell you when something changes in another system. Ask in chat when you want the answer, for example on Friday morning when you want the weekly numbers.
Before you start
Sign up for Composio at composio.dev/for-you.
Choose the For You service. Composio's other offerings are built for software developers.
Sign up with the same account you use for Brief. The two services connect to the same systems on your behalf, and matching accounts keeps that straightforward later.
As of September 2026, For You is free for up to 100,000 tool calls per month, with paid plans above that. Check their pricing page for the current terms.
Step 1: connect your apps in Composio
This article configures Google Drive as the worked example, so you can build workflows around reading and updating your own documents. The steps are the same for any other system Composio supports.
- Open Composio and check the Switch dropdown at the top. Select For You if it is not already selected.
- Click Connect Apps.
- Type "Google" in the search bar at the top of the screen. All four apps you need come back together.
- Connect each of them in turn. Composio asks you to sign in to Google and approve the access each one needs.
Connect all four, because they carry different permissions and one spreadsheet question often needs more than one:
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Slides
- Google Sheets
For any other system, search its name the same way.
Step 2: connect Composio in Brief
Composio is an MCP server, so it connects through the same screen as any other agent tool.
- In Brief, go to Settings → Connections, and navigate to the Agent tools group.
- Enter this server URL:
https://connect.composio.dev/mcp - Click Connect. Brief sends you through a login sequence for your Composio account, which is what links the two.
- Choose the tools Brief needs access to. Check these four:
- Manage connections
- Multi Execute Composio Tools
- Search Composio Tools
- Wait for connection
For what else lives on that screen, see Connection settings.
Step 3: check that it works
Open the Ask Brief chat and prompt:
Connect to Google Drive and list all of my Google Sheets. Tell me about the first spreadsheet in that list.
Brief returns a list of your Google Sheets and a description of the first one. Brief is now reaching your Google Drive and the content in it, and you can start asking real questions of it, or giving instructions on what to update next.
If nothing comes back, the usual cause is a system connected in Composio but not yet approved, or a tool left unchecked in step 2. A system connected in Composio does nothing in Brief until its tools are enabled under Settings → Connections. When Brief says it cannot open a file you know is there, check that screen first and confirm all four tools are selected.
When a request does not work
The result is too long. Brief can take in about 32,000 characters from any one tool call. A whole transcript, a long document or a large spreadsheet range can run past that. Ask for a named range, one meeting at a time, or a summary of a section.
An email attachment. Brief cannot open email attachments through Composio. Ask it to save the attachment to Google Drive or OneDrive first and then read it from there. That works unless the file is very large.
Some systems need more than a sign-in. Excel, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk and Fathom connect with a sign-in. Others, such as Freshdesk, ServiceNow or NetSuite, ask for an API key, your own credentials or an administrator's setup in Composio.
Related
- Connecting Brief to any MCP server covers the same steps for a server other than Composio.
- Connection settings covers the Connections screen itself.
- Connecting AI assistants to the Brief MCP server is the other direction: reaching Brief from ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok.
- Agents covers what agents can do today, and what they cannot reach yet.