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Company Brain has two kinds of connectors. They look similar on the connections page, but they do different jobs:

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Data connectors

Data connectors sync existing files and docs into public channel memory so answers are grounded in real material — roadmaps, specs, handbooks, design docs. How it works:
  1. An admin connects a source (Drive, Notion workspace, OneDrive, and similar).
  2. Company Brain fetches, chunks, embeds, and indexes the content in the background.
  3. It re-syncs on a schedule automatically — you don’t re-upload when a doc changes.
Connecting a data source is a team-level action. What comes in is visible org-wide, same as anything from a public channel — see the permissions graph for exactly who can read what.
A data connector is only as useful as the docs you point it at. Start with the handful of sources people actually re-read — product specs, the handbook, the latest roadmap — rather than every folder in Drive.

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Tool connectors

Tool connectors are live integrations (MCP-based under the hood). They don’t just index past content — they read and act in the tool right now:
  • GitHub — open PRs, recent commits, repo context
  • Linear — find or create issues, check status
  • Sentry — what’s actually erroring in prod
  • Plain — customer support tickets and history
  • PostHog — product analytics
  • Granola — meeting notes and decisions
  • Custom servers — wire up your own MCP endpoint when the catalog doesn’t cover a tool
You can also connect tools at two scopes — Organization (shared) or Personal (yours). The full rule of thumb lives on The permissions graph: reads prefer your personal connection and fall back to the org one; writes always run under your own account so the action is attributed to you. If neither you nor the org has a tool connected, but a teammate does, Company Brain can ask them to lease temporary access for that one request — see Leasing.

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Which one do I need?

  • “What’s in our Q2 roadmap?” → data connector (Drive/Notion/OneDrive already synced)
  • “What are my open PRs?” or “Create a Linear issue” → tool connector (GitHub / Linear)
  • “What did we decide in the Acme call?” → tool connector that also brings knowledge in (Granola), or a data connector if notes live in Drive/Notion
You almost always want both: data connectors for the long-lived knowledge base, tool connectors for the live work happening this week.

Automations & proactiveness

Scheduled digests and unprompted replies that use these connections.

What you can do

Walkthroughs of support, incidents, PRs, meetings, and more.