A year ago the question was whether an HR system had an API. Now it is whether the assistant your team already uses can work in it: look up a leave balance, add a candidate, approve a request. The plumbing for that is the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, and most serious HR vendors have published a connector for it. So the useful question is no longer “does it have one?”. It is who is allowed to connect, what the assistant can change once it is in, and who can see what it did.
We read seven vendors’ own documentation on 4 October 2026, ours included, and wrote down what each page says. Nothing below was tested hands-on apart from Orbiz, so treat it as a shortlist to verify, not a ranking.
The shortlist at a glance
| System | Connector | Who can connect | What its page says it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho People | Yes, through Zoho MCP | Not stated on the page | Look up employee, leave and attendance data; approve a leave request; generate reports |
| BambooHR | Yes, in beta | Members an admin includes when enabling the AI Connectors app | Employees, time off, goals and hiring; some tools write and some delete |
| Workable | Yes | Any user, within their account permissions | Over 90 tools: candidates, pipeline moves, requisitions, time-off balances |
| Deel | Yes | Organisation-level and worker-level access are separate | Contracts, people, time-off requests |
| Gusto | Yes | An account with global or full admin permissions | 72 tools across payroll, employees and time |
| Keka | None listed on its integrations page | — | — |
| Orbiz | Yes, Orbiz MCP | Any member, within their role; an admin can switch it off for everyone | 14 HRMS actions for tasks, jobs and candidates; 10 in AMS for timesheets and leave; 7 in Ledgr for pay |
Two things stand out. First, a connector is now ordinary: six of the seven have one. Second, they differ a great deal in who they are for. Gusto’s is for the administrator. BambooHR’s is gated by an admin setting. Workable’s and ours follow the individual user’s permissions. That difference matters more than the tool count.
Three questions that separate them
Who is the assistant acting as?
The safest design is the one where the assistant is simply you. Workable’s help page says the assistant can access data and perform actions only if your user account is authorised to. BambooHR’s documentation says the server enforces BambooHR’s permissions exactly, and that what you can do through an assistant matches what you can do signed in. Orbiz works the same way: the approval page tells you the assistant can only see and do what you can on the web, in the areas you allow.
The alternative is a connector only an administrator can set up, which is how Gusto describes its own. That is a reasonable choice for payroll, where the person asking usually is the administrator. It also means an employee cannot ask about their own payslip through it.
Can it change things, and which things?
Reading and writing are very different risks. BambooHR marks each tool in its documentation as read, write or delete, which is the kind of plain labelling to look for. Some connectors outside HR are read-only by design: Hubstaff says its server can retrieve data but cannot create, modify or delete anything.
In Orbiz the split is made when you connect. Reading and changing are separate ticks for each tool, changing pay is a third tick with its own warning, and nothing can be deleted through an assistant at all. If you tick reading only, the assistant has no way to change anything, whatever it is asked.
Who can see what it did, and stop it?
An assistant is fast and occasionally wrong, so you want a record and an off switch. Zoho’s page speaks of access controls and audit trails. Gusto’s goes further in its warnings than most: it tells customers to use the connector in an isolated session, not to mix it with other connectors, and to review each tool call before approving it. That is honest advice and it applies to every product on this list.
In Orbiz every action an assistant takes is listed in an activity log with the outcome and the time; members see their own and admins see the organisation’s. Any member can disconnect an assistant, an admin can disconnect anyone’s, and one switch turns assistants off for the whole organisation. More on the reasoning is in what AI assistants should never see in your company.
Where Orbiz is narrower, and where it is wider
Be clear about what you are buying. In HR records, Orbiz exposes less to an assistant than BambooHR or Workable. The HRMS connector covers the workflow tasks waiting on you, open jobs and candidates. It does not expose employee records, documents, interviews or assessments. If your reason for connecting an assistant is to ask questions across the employee database, BambooHR’s or Zoho People’s connector does more of that today.
Where it is wider is everything around HR. The same connection reaches attendance and leave in AMS, pay in Ledgr, and the project, file and notes tools, under one approval and one log. An HR manager can ask what tasks are waiting, approve a leave request and add a candidate in one conversation, without three connectors from three vendors.
What to ask a vendor before you switch it on
- Does it act as the person or as the organisation? Ask what an ordinary employee’s assistant can see.
- Is reading separate from changing? And can anything be deleted through it?
- Which data never goes through it? Bank details, documents, salaries of other people.
- Is there a log an admin can read, and can one person switch it off for everybody?
- Which plan includes it? Ask about the connector and about its admin controls separately, and get the answer in writing.
- Which assistants are supported today? Claude and ChatGPT set up differently; see our pages on Claude and ChatGPT for what each needs on its side.
Sources, read 4 October 2026: Zoho’s blog post introducing Zoho MCP for Zoho People; BambooHR’s MCP server documentation; Workable’s help article on its MCP server; Deel’s MCP server documentation; Gusto’s MCP documentation; Keka’s integrations page; Hubstaff’s support article on its MCP server. If you are choosing an HR system in Pakistan more broadly, see the best HR software in Pakistan.
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