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Product9 min read

Bring your own connectors: Gmail and Salesforce in a workflow

Agents are only as useful as the tools they can reach. How BYO OAuth connectors let a crew act on your real systems, with tokens encrypted at rest.

An agent that can only reason is a very expensive autocomplete. The agents that earn their keep are the ones that can act — read the inbox, look up the account, draft the reply, update the record. That means reaching into the systems your team already runs on, which for a lot of teams means Gmail and Salesforce.

LoopLlama ships first-party connectors for both, built on a bring-your-own-credentials model: you connect your own Google and Salesforce accounts, and your agents act as you, against your data.

OAuth, encrypted at rest#

Connecting a provider runs a standard OAuth flow. The resulting tokens are encrypted at rest and scoped to your tenant — they're never shared across customers and never exposed to the model. When an agent uses a connector, LoopLlama exchanges the encrypted token server-side and makes the call on the agent's behalf. The model sees the results, not the credentials.

Exposing a connector as tools#

Each connector surfaces a small set of typed tools the agent can call with structured arguments:

  • Gmail: read and search threads, and draft or send messages.
  • Salesforce: query records, and create or update objects like leads, contacts, and opportunities.

Because the arguments are typed, the agent can't invent a malformed request — it fills in a schema, and the connector validates it before anything touches your account. The same mechanism works for your own APIs: expose them via OpenAPI or a simple JSON schema and they become tools alongside the built-in connectors.

Least privilege and approval gates#

Reaching into real systems demands real guardrails. Connect only the scopes a workflow needs, and put the destructive verbs behind approval gates: let an agent read freely, but require a human yes before it sends an email or writes to the CRM. Combined with per-step traces — which record exactly which tool an agent called with which arguments — you get agents that can act on your systems and a clear, auditable account of everything they did.

Written by The LoopLlama team.

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