Connect Tenderlake to Claude.ai | Tenderlake

Tenderlake + Claude.ai Connector


Ask Claude about your Tenderlake procurement notices in plain language. Once the Tenderlake connector is added to your Claude.ai workspace, you can have Claude summarise notices, surface deadlines, compare opportunities, or help you draft responses – all grounded in your own Tenderlake folders. Workgroups on Tenderlake Analyst additionally get market-wide analytics: competitor win/loss, buyer profiling, framework/DPS intelligence and semantic AI search across the whole procurement corpus.

The connector cannot change anything in your folders, notices, or settings. Nearly every tool is read-only; the only exceptions are two narrowly-scoped Analyst tools that create or update the analysis organisations used for competitor/buyer analytics (nothing can be deleted), plus the ability to send us product feedback.

What you'll need

  • A Claude.ai account on a plan that supports connectors (check Settings > Connectors in Claude.ai to confirm availability)
  • A Tenderlake login with AI assistant access enabled for your workgroup
  • A few minutes

No API keys are involved – you connect by signing in to Tenderlake and approving the connection, the same way you'd connect any modern app.

Step 1: Make sure you have AI assistant access

AI assistant access is granted per member by your workgroup's Tenderlake Admin:

  1. Your Admin logs in to Tenderlake and goes to Developers > Developer Section > AI Assistant Access
  2. They click Grant next to your name

If you're the Admin, you can grant yourself (and your colleagues) access on the same page. If you skip this step, the connection flow will show an "Ask your administrator" page instead of the approval screen.

Step 2: Add the Tenderlake connector to Claude.ai

Tenderlake is listed in Claude's connectors directory, so there is no URL to enter:

  1. Log in to claude.ai
  2. Open the Tenderlake listing in the directory – or, inside Claude, open Settings (click your name in the bottom-left corner), choose Connectors, click Browse connectors and search for Tenderlake
  3. Add the connector – Claude.ai will then send you to Tenderlake to approve the connection.
Using another AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and the rest), or prefer to add Tenderlake by hand? Add it as a custom connector (sometimes called a remote MCP server) in the assistant's settings, give it a friendly name, e.g. Tenderlake, and enter the connector URL:
https://mcp.tenderlake.com/mcp
The sign-in and approval steps are the same either way.

Step 3: Sign in and approve

  1. If you aren't already signed in to Tenderlake in that browser, you'll see the normal Tenderlake login – sign in as usual. (Already signed in? You'll skip straight to the approval screen.)
  2. The approval screen shows which app is asking to connect, what it will be able to read, and where you'll be returned after approving. If you belong to more than one workgroup with access, pick the one to connect.
  3. Click Approve. You'll be returned to Claude.ai and the Tenderlake connector should show as Connected.
What happens behind the scenes: Tenderlake issues Claude.ai a short-lived access token tied to your own account and workgroup. Claude.ai uses that token on every request. There are no API keys for you to handle, and your Tenderlake password is only ever entered on Tenderlake's own login page.

Step 4: Try it out

Start a new chat in Claude.ai. Because connector tools are only available in new conversations after the connector is added, open a fresh chat rather than continuing an existing one.

Try one of these to confirm everything's working:

Simple connection test

"Using the Tenderlake connector, which account am I connected as?"

Claude should tell you which Tenderlake workgroup the connection is bound to.

See what's in your account

"List all my Tenderlake folders and tell me how many notices are in each."

"What AI searches do I have configured on Tenderlake?"

Practical daily questions

"Show me procurement notices from my Inbox folder published in the last 7 days. Group them by organisation."

"What's the deadline of every open notice in my Shortlist folder? Sort by deadline, earliest first."

"Summarise the top 3 notices in Inbox by their assessment score from my 'IT infrastructure' AI search."

Deeper analysis

"Find notices in Shortlist where the buyer is located in Germany or France, and draft a short pitch paragraph for each one based on what the notice actually asks for."

"Compare the scopes of work in the three most recent notices in Inbox. Where do they overlap, and where do they differ?"

"Translate the description of notice <noticeId> into English and summarise it in 5 bullet points."

Tenderlake Analyst (for entitled workgroups)

Workgroups with Tenderlake Analyst access see additional analytics tools alongside the basic ones. These work across the whole procurement corpus (within your plan's regions), not just your folders:

  • Competitor and buyer analytics – what a named company won and from whom, what a buyer awarded, tendered, or is planning
  • Market scans – keyword/CPV/region searches across all notices and awards
  • Framework & DPS intelligence – which buying vehicles are most used, who calls off through them, which frameworks a buyer or competitor works through
  • Semantic AI search – run your saved AI searches live to find contextually matching opportunities across languages

Try prompts like:

"We are <company>. We supply <what we supply>. We are considering an approach to <buyer>. Use Tenderlake for this and look at the last five years. Brief us on what they have procured in our space and around it, who their suppliers are and which of them we would be up against, what their notices and planning documents say they care about, and identify our possible wedges. Separate what the data shows from what you infer."

"How is Acme Ltd doing in UK public sector – what have they won in the last 12 months, and from which buyers?"

"Which frameworks are mainly used to buy IT services in the UK, and who operates them?"

"Run my 'lab equipment' AI search over the last 30 days for France and summarise the best matches."

Analyst tool calls are metered in credits (your workgroup's credits are topped up by agreement with us). Each metered response states what that call cost, and – if your admin has set you a monthly allowance – how much of your allowance is left, so your own spend is always visible. The workgroup's overall credit balance is shown to your admin in Tenderlake. If your workgroup isn't Analyst-entitled, these tools simply don't appear.

What the connector can and cannot do

The connector can:

  • List your folders
  • List notices in a folder, optionally filtered by date and language
  • Retrieve full details of a single notice (including original and translated text)
  • List your AI searches and demand signals
  • Send product feedback to the Tenderlake team
  • (Analyst workgroups) run the analytics above, and create/update the analysis organisations (named buyers/suppliers) those analytics are built on

The connector cannot:

  • Add notices to folders
  • Copy or move notices between folders
  • Delete anything – notices, folders, organisations, searches
  • Change any account settings
  • Access notices outside your plan's regions, or data outside your Tenderlake account

This is enforced on our side – not a convention. Every tool is checked against your workgroup's entitlements on every call.

What Tenderlake can and cannot see

When you chat with Claude using the Tenderlake connector, your conversation stays with Claude.ai. Tenderlake never sees it.

Think of Claude as a translator standing between you and Tenderlake. You ask Claude something in plain language; Claude figures out exactly what data it needs to answer you, and asks Tenderlake for only that. Tenderlake replies with the data, and Claude writes the answer back to you.

For example, you might ask Claude:

"Which notices in my Shortlist folder have a deadline before the end of the month?"

Claude reads your question, then sends Tenderlake a narrow request – something like "list notices in the Shortlist folder with deadline before 30 April." Tenderlake returns the matching notices. Claude uses those to write an answer for you.

What Tenderlake sees: the specific data lookups Claude makes on your behalf (folder names, date filters, notice ids) – exactly the same information you'd generate if you called the Tenderlake API yourself from your own software. We record these lookups in our standard request log so you can audit what was accessed, the same way we already do for every other API integration.

What Tenderlake does not see: the question you typed, anything else you discussed in the chat, Claude's reasoning, or the answer Claude wrote for you. That content stays inside Claude.ai and never reaches us.

Full details are in the Tenderlake AI Connector Privacy Policy, which supplements the main Tenderlake Privacy Policy.

Revoking access

To disconnect Claude.ai from Tenderlake, use either method:

  • In Claude.ai – go to Settings > Connectors, find the Tenderlake connector, and remove it.
  • In Tenderlake – your workgroup's Tenderlake Admin can revoke your AI assistant access under Developers > Developer Section > AI Assistant Access. This cuts off the connection within about a minute, and also applies automatically if you leave the workgroup.

Troubleshooting

"Couldn't connect to the connector"

  • If you added Tenderlake by hand as a custom connector, check the URL is exactly https://mcp.tenderlake.com/mcp (no trailing slash) – or add it from the directory listing instead, which has no URL to mistype.
  • Confirm your Claude.ai plan supports connectors.

The approval page says "Ask your administrator"

  • Your account doesn't have AI assistant access yet – ask your workgroup's Tenderlake Admin to grant it (Step 1), then start the connection again from Claude.ai.

The page says "This connection request has expired"

  • The connection link is valid for 10 minutes. Just start again from Claude.ai's connector settings – it takes seconds when you're already signed in.

Claude says it can't see my folders

  • Open a new chat – tools aren't attached to existing conversations.
  • Verify the connector is still shown as Connected in Claude.ai Settings.
  • Ask Claude explicitly: "Using the Tenderlake connector, list my folders."

Claude returns stale data

  • The connector reads live from Tenderlake on every call. If data looks wrong, ask Claude to retry the request – it may have used a cached answer from earlier in the conversation.

Rate-limited

  • Tenderlake caps each connection's request rate. If Claude is making many rapid calls, it will pause briefly and resume.

Getting help

  • Email hello@tenderlake.com
  • Include your Tenderlake login email and workgroup name so we can look up activity in our logs.