You can connect ZEP to an AI application of your choice and do the same things there as in the ZEP Assistant: record times, read reports, maintain projects, customers, tickets and receipts. The connection uses MCP, an open standard through which AI applications access business systems.

Whether external AI applications may actually connect is decided by a switch in the administration. It is off to begin with. See the section Administration and switching off.

You set this up once in your AI application.

The connection renews itself in the background, you will not notice it. If you do not use it for 30 days, you consent once again.

You talk to your AI in your own words. The application finds the right tool itself, you do not have to learn any commands. A few examples from the three areas that are needed most often:

Covered are project times, projects, customers, employees, tickets, work items, receipts, absences, offers, suppliers, invoices, dynamic attributes, planning and reports. Not every area can also be changed: invoices and reports are read-only, and with offers only the note and the status can be changed. Of the planning you see the generation your account uses, so either the new resource planning or the old one.

The application sees and changes exclusively what you yourself are permitted to do in ZEP: your role, your projects, your department. There is no extended access for machines. Every action checks the same rights as the ZEP Assistant.

If a person leaves the company, their connection stops working from the first day without a valid employment period. This applies regardless of whether the connection is still set up technically.

Reading works directly. Every change, by contrast, takes two steps.

Directly visible are all reading tools, the recording of project times, the search and the two tools for confirming and cancelling. Everything else sits in a tool search that your AI queries itself. This keeps the list short and the application fast. If your AI does not find a task straight away, ask differently or more precisely.

If you remove the server in your AI application, it stops addressing ZEP. In ZEP this revokes nothing: the access key already issued remains valid for up to one hour, the renewal for up to 30 days. After that the connection expires by itself. If a connection has to end immediately, the administration switches off access through MCP. That then affects every connection in your organisation.

Individual connections cannot be revoked one by one. If a device goes missing, the only remedy is therefore the switch in the administration, which rejects every connection at once.

Under Administration > ZEP AI Features > ZEP MCP, administrators control access for the entire tenant. The switch is called Allow access for external AI applications via MCP and is off to begin with. An administrator opens the page, ticks the box and saves. While the switch is off, ZEP rejects every connection. Anyone who already used ZEP MCP keeps access without doing anything.

Within ZEP, the following applies: the AI application works with your account and therefore with exactly your rights. ZEP does not grant any additional permissions for machines, and every change is recorded in the change log. ZEP itself does not additionally analyse your data in this process.

Outside of ZEP, you determine the conditions yourself through the choice of your AI application. What your AI application does with the retrieved data is governed by the terms of its provider. The commitments ZEP makes for the ZEP Assistant do not apply there. So check which provider your organisation wants to work with before you enable access.

ZEP delivers data exclusively to the application you have connected yourself.