AI Assistants

Connect your own AI assistant, like Claude or ChatGPT, to Novant so you can ask questions about your buildings in plain language. An assistant acts as you, with your permissions, and can only see projects you already have access to.

What You Can Do

Once connected, you can ask your assistant things like:

• “Which of my projects have offline nodes?”
• “Show me the supply air temperature trend for AHU-1 last week.”
• “List the VAV boxes in the east wing and their current setpoints.”
• “Help me prepare a source map import for these untyped points.”

The assistant looks up your Novant data to answer, using the same projects, points, and trends you see in Novant.

Before You Start

• You need an AI assistant that supports custom connectors (also called MCP servers), such as Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, or Codex. Some assistant providers only offer custom connectors on certain of their own plans.
• Your organization must allow AI assistants. They are on by default; an organization admin can turn them off (see For Organization Admins).

Connect an Assistant

1. Copy the Novant connector URL:

   https://mcp.novant.io/mcp

2. In your assistant’s settings, add a custom connector (or MCP server) and paste the URL. Leave any API key or token fields empty.

3. When the assistant asks, sign in to Novant.

4. Check the app and account Novant shows, and click Allow.

The assistant is now connected, and appears under Account Settings → AI Assistants. There is nothing to copy back into the assistant and no key to store: the connection signs in for you.

What It Can Access

When you connect, Novant shows which app is asking (its name and web address) and the account you’re signed in with. Once you allow it, the assistant acts as you on every project you can access, including projects you’re added to later, with the same permissions you have.

To keep an assistant from changing anything, turn off its write tools in your assistant’s connector settings, where your assistant supports it.

What It Can Do

An assistant can do what you can do on each project, except control your building: it can never write values back to your equipment.

Your role	Read project data	Edit project information	Control or write to your building
Viewer	Yes	No	No
Editor	Yes	Yes	No
Operator	Yes	Yes	No
Manager	Yes	Yes	No

• Reading – the assistant can look up projects, points, equipment, live values, and trends.
• Editing project information – the same changes you could make yourself, such as adding zones, spaces, assets, sources, and points, and updating their names, types, props, and units. See Limits.

Limits

When an assistant can change project information, some things are always off limits, so a mistake can never remove data or disconnect equipment:

• Never deletes. An assistant can’t delete anything: it can’t remove points, delete source maps, or unbind a source from its source map or node. Ask it to and it will tell you to do that in Novant yourself.
• Never repoints equipment. An assistant can’t change the address of an existing point or source, or move a source to a different source map or node, since that would change which equipment it reads and writes. It can set these on new points and sources.
• Shows changes first. Before changing anything, the assistant checks the change and shows you exactly what it would add and update. It only applies the change once you confirm, and an invalid change is never partly applied.
• Recorded under your name. Every change appears in the project’s audit log as made by you, like any change you make in Novant.

How Access Is Decided

For each project, an assistant gets the lower of:

• Your own role on the project (see What It Can Do).
• Your organization’s AI Assistants setting (set by an organization admin), which can limit every assistant to Read only, or turn them Off.

For example, if your organization limits assistants to Read only, your assistant can only view data, even if you are an Editor. If you lose access to a project, or your organization turns assistants off, the assistant loses it too, right away.

Manage Your Connections

Open your avatar menu, select Account Settings, then AI Assistants, to see every assistant you’ve connected and when it was last used. Disconnect removes an assistant’s access immediately; to use it again, connect it from the assistant.

Connecting the same assistant again replaces its previous connection.

If an assistant can only read a project, or can’t reach an organization’s projects at all, just ask it why: it can tell you whether your organization’s setting or your role is the limit, and who can change it.

For Organization Admins

Organization admins control AI assistants for the whole organization under Organization Settings → AI Assistants:

Setting	Effect
User permissions	Assistants can do what the person who connects them can do (the default)
Read only	Assistants can only view project data, whatever the person’s role
Off	Assistants can’t reach any of the organization’s projects

The setting caps every member’s assistant and applies right away; turning it back on restores access without anyone reconnecting. Members connect assistants from their own account – there is nothing to set up per organization.

Security and Privacy

• An assistant acts as you. It can never see more than you can, and everything it does is recorded under your name, like any change you make.
• Novant never shares your password with the assistant. Signing in happens on Novant, and you can disconnect at any time.
• Resetting a forgotten password disconnects all of your assistants, so reconnect them after a reset. Changing your password from your account settings does not.
• Data your assistant reads from Novant is sent to that assistant’s provider (for example, Anthropic or OpenAI) and handled under their terms. An assistant fetches data only as it needs it to answer you: for example, your list of project names when it looks up a project, and a project’s points and trends only when you ask about it.
• Assistant requests count toward each project’s monthly data allowance, the same as the Novant API.