Connecting your own AI assistant

e-Request does not embed a model of its own. You connect your own AI assistant — Claude, for example — to your account. It then acts on your behalf and sees exactly what you see in the portal, no more. Every change carries your name.

Prerequisite: your administration has switched on “Allow personal AI access”. If it has not, you will not see the My AI access page.

Two ways to connect

Which one fits depends on your assistant.

Assistants in the browser connect without a key. There you only enter the address of your MCP server, such as https://purchasing.your-company.ch/mcp — the exact address is shown in the settings under MCP server, or ask your administration.

The assistant then opens an e-Request page: Connect AI assistant. It says who wants to connect, that it acts as you, and whether it may only read or also create and change drafts. Connect grants the access.

A personal key

Assistants on your computer — such as Claude Desktop or Claude Code — need a key.

Open My Profile → My AI access → Issue AI access.
Give the access a name you will recognise, such as “Claude on my laptop”.
Choose how long it is valid, and whether it may only read or read and write.
To issue it you must have signed in shortly before; with two-factor sign-in, e-Request asks for your code.
Copy the key right away. It is shown only this one time.

In the assistant you enter the address of the MCP server and the key as Authorization: Bearer <key>. In Claude Code, for example:

claude mcp add --transport http e-request https://purchasing.your-company.ch/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer erq_pat_…"

You get an email when access has been issued, and a week before it expires.

What your assistant can do

With read access it answers questions about requests, offers, suppliers, question rounds, contracts and appointment findings — as far as you can see them in the portal yourself. Budgets and offer totals only if your administration has allowed amounts.

With write access it works along:

Internal and reversible steps it carries out at once: create a draft, change fields, put an offer on the shortlist, prepare an answer to a supplier question, write a comment.
Binding steps it never carries out itself: publish, reject an offer, award, write to a supplier, propose dates, send a contract for signature, delete. For these it puts the step before you and gives you a link.

What you may not do in the portal, your assistant may not do either. And some things stay in the portal entirely: uploading documents, creating a new contract, everything in the settings.

Confirming binding steps

The link leads to the Pending AI confirmations page. It shows exactly what would happen: which step, on which record, with which text, whom it reaches — for appointments also the dates that go out.

Confirm and run carries out the step, as you, exactly as in the portal.
Decline discards it. Nothing happens.

A confirmation is valid for 60 minutes. If the record has changed in the meantime, it lapses — ask for the step again. Only you can confirm, nobody else, not even the administration.

Read before you confirm. Text a supplier wrote — a question, an offer title — is data for your assistant, not instructions. The confirmation is the moment you check whether the proposal matches what you wanted.

Ending the access

Under My AI access you see your keys and your connected assistants, with the time of last use.

Revoke ends a key immediately.
Disconnect ends the connection of an assistant you connected with “Sign in with e-Request”.

Access also ends when it expires. With SSO, sign in to the portal at least once every 14 days — otherwise your access pauses until you do.