On Belay

Core concepts: how On Belay works

One AI. The whole team. The right context for each person, every session.

On Belay gives every person on your team Claude with the right context for their role, scoped access to your tools, and guardrails that stop them from doing something they can't undo. You explain your org to On Belay once. Every Claude session your team opens inherits it.

This article is the mental model. The rest of the help center assumes the terms defined here, so it's worth reading first. Every term also lives in the Glossary.

The one-sentence model

An organization contains functional groups. Each group gives Claude a role and scoped access to your integrations. People (and agents) belong to groups, and MCP is how Claude reads it all — with the proxy keeping your credentials server-side the whole time.

Organization

Your organization is your company's account in On Belay. It holds your people, your groups, your connected integrations, your custom agents, and your billing. Everything is scoped to the org — one org never sees another's data.

New orgs start on a 14-day trial with full access. Signed-in admins can read Plans, trial & billing in the help center for what happens after.

Functional groups — the core unit

A functional group is a team — Marketing, Engineering, Finance, Owner. It is the unit that holds context and access. A group bundles five things:

  • Claude role — plain-text instructions that shape how Claude behaves for the team (its job, tone, standing rules).
  • Strategy — the team's goals and priorities, so Claude's suggestions tie back to what the team actually cares about.
  • People Guidelines — how Claude should treat the people on the team.
  • Integration access — which connected tools the group can use, and which operations.
  • Members — the people and agents in the group.

A person can belong to more than one group, and Claude sees the combined context. Editing a group takes effect on the next request — no redeploy. The five editor tabs and per-operation permissions are covered in Functional groups & permissions.

Claude role, Strategy, and People Guidelines

These three text fields are what make Claude feel like it actually knows your team. The difference between the two context tools is scope, not content: get_my_context returns the Claude role, strategy, and people guidelines for every group the member belongs to, while get_group_context returns the same fields (plus the description) for one group looked up by name. You write them once, in On Belay, and every session reads the current version.

Integrations and the proxy

An integration is a connection to a third-party tool — Shopify, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Slack, and many more. An admin connects an integration at the org level first, then grants it to specific groups. Within a group, access is set per operation — a single named API action, like "list orders" or "create deal."

The proxy is the piece that makes this safe. When Claude calls an integration, the request goes through On Belay's proxy, which attaches the credential server-side and forwards the call. Claude never sees a raw API key. Your credentials never leave On Belay. See Integrations overview for how connection and access flow.

Principals — users and Service Identities

A principal is the identity an action runs as. There are two kinds:

  • A User — a real person on your team.
  • A Service Identity — a non-human principal scoped to your org, for work that isn't tied to one person (most often a custom agent's identity).

A group member is one or the other, never both. An active custom agent runs as exactly one principal too. Whichever it is, the principal's group memberships decide what it can touch — an agent running as a Service Identity can only reach the integrations and operations granted to the groups that Service Identity belongs to. That's the whole access model: membership gates access, for people and agents alike. Signed-in admins can read People, roles & Service Identities in the help center for the full detail.

MCP

MCP (the Model Context Protocol) is the open standard Claude uses to call On Belay's tools. On Belay runs an MCP server at https://app.onbelay.ai/api/mcp. When your team connects Claude to that URL, Claude can read context and call integrations through On Belay's tools — the same set every session, governed by the same rules. See Connecting Claude (MCP) to set it up and MCP tool reference for what each tool does.

How it all connects

Here's the model end to end:

  1. You set it up once. An admin creates a "Marketing" group, writes its Claude role and strategy, connects Shopify and Klaviyo at the org level, grants both to the group, and adds two marketers as members.
  2. Someone opens Claude. A marketer connects Claude to On Belay's MCP URL and starts a session. Claude loads their context — the Marketing role, the team's strategy, the people guidelines.
  3. Claude does the work. When the marketer asks for last week's top products, Claude calls the Shopify integration through the proxy. The proxy attaches the credential, runs the call, and returns the data. Claude never touches the key.
  4. The guardrails hold. If the marketer's group isn't permitted an operation, the call is refused with an explanation. For an action that genuinely needs a human, Claude can file an approval request instead of acting. Signed-in admins can read Governance: approvals & audit log in the help center for how approvals and the audit log work.

Set it up once. It works every session. Go fast, be safe.