Introduction

Connect an AI assistant to your NeetoDesk workspace over the Model Context Protocol.

NeetoDesk runs a hosted MCP server. Connecting an assistant to it lets you work on tickets by asking in plain language, rather than switching to the web app or writing API calls.

Model Context Protocol is an open standard for exposing an application’s data and actions to an AI assistant. You do not need to know how it works to use it, and there is nothing to run or host yourself.

What an assistant can do

Resource	Abilities
Tickets	List, search, read, create and update tickets
Comments and drafts	List and read comments, post a reply or internal note, save a draft
Customers	Create a customer
Team members	List, read, invite, update and deactivate members
Forms	List the workspace’s enabled web forms
Reports	Ticket volume, daily time series, agent and group performance, satisfaction surveys

The full list, with what each tool does, is on the Tools page.

MCP vs CLI: which should I use?

NeetoDesk’s CLI reaches the same resources this server does - tickets, comments and drafts, customers, forms, team members and reports. The one thing it has no equivalent for is search, which looks through ticket subjects and the text of their comments. Past that, neither can do more than the other, so choose on how the work reaches NeetoDesk.

Reach for MCP when

• The details live in your chat, not in your head. A forwarded email thread, or a complaint pasted out of Slack, turns into a ticket with the customer, subject and description already filled in. neetodesk tickets create needs you to type --email, --subject and --description yourself, because the CLI cannot see any of it.
• You have not decided the steps yet. “The refund queue is a mess - sort it out” means reading a thirty-comment thread, judging whether the customer is still waiting, and only then picking a status. A command can only carry out a decision you have already made.
• One request should cover several steps. Find the open tickets about failed card payments, summarize what each customer is asking for, and draft a holding reply on the oldest one, with no glue between commands.
• The person doing it does not use a terminal. A support lead who works in the web app all day can connect their assistant and start asking. NeetoDesk hosts the server, so there is nothing to install or keep updated.

Reach for the CLI instead when

• No AI assistant should be in the loop. A nightly cron entry that sweeps the pending queue runs the CLI with nothing but the binary and a saved session - no assistant open, no model account, no tokens spent per run. Every call made here needs something with model access running first.
• The output feeds another program. The CLI prints the bare ticket id with --quiet, or a data envelope with --json that goes straight into jq, a spreadsheet or your own dashboard. Here you get prose you would have to copy out by hand.
• You are working through thousands of tickets. Here every page is a separate tool call, and a queue that long crowds out the assistant’s context. The CLI takes --page-size 100 and returns current_page_number, total_pages, total_records and page_size alongside the tickets, so a shell loop walks the whole queue unattended and writes each page to a file or into jq - the size of the queue stops mattering.
• The run has to be repeatable and reviewable. A command is the artifact: it says exactly what it will do before anyone runs it, and repeats identically. Ask twice here and the assistant may take a different route.

You can have both. Run neetodesk setup claude and the same assistant drives the CLI for you, so a plain-language request still ends in an exact command you can read, repeat and paste into a script.

These tools act on your live workspace. Ask your assistant to show you what it plans to do before it posts a reply the customer will read, changes a ticket’s status or deactivates a team member.

Prerequisites

• A NeetoDesk workspace and an account on it.
• An AI assistant that supports remote MCP servers. See Connect for the ones covered here.
• Optionally, a NeetoDesk API key. A key is needed only for workspace-scoped access. Every client listed on the Connect page can sign in with OAuth instead, so most people need no key at all.

Which credential to use

This is a permissions boundary, not a setup preference, so it is worth deciding up front:

	OAuth	API key
Scope	The person who approved it	The whole workspace
Identity	A NeetoDesk user	None
Set up by	Pasting the server URL	Pasting a key into a config file

Authentication explains what each one can reach and why.

Next steps

Authentication

OAuth, API keys and what each can see.

Connect

Per-client setup for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and the rest.

Examples

Prompts to try once you are connected.

Tools

Every tool the server exposes.