The Affinity integration lets you query your firm's live Affinity CRM from inside AlphaSense, so you can pull deal pipelines, company and contact records, notes, meetings, and relationship intelligence into the same answer as AlphaSense's external research. The connection is authorized by each user individually, is read-only, and mirrors your own Affinity permissions — AlphaSense only ever returns records you can already see in Affinity.
This is a real-time connector. Your Affinity data is queried live at the moment you ask a question. Nothing from Affinity is copied into or indexed by AlphaSense's search index.
Contents
- Before You Begin
- Step 1: Affinity Admin Setup
- Step 2: Individual User Connection
- What's Accessible
- How It Works
- Items to Note
- Modify or Revoke Access
- Troubleshooting & FAQs
- Sources
Before You Begin
- Affinity plan. Your firm must be on an Affinity Scale, Advanced, or Enterprise plan. Affinity's API and MCP access are only included on these tiers — an Essential plan cannot connect, no matter how the steps below are followed. (Affinity: Getting Started with Affinity MCP, Affinity: Getting started with the Affinity API + FAQs)
- An Affinity admin must enable AlphaSense first. Affinity administrators control which applications may connect to their Affinity data under Settings → Affinity MCP. AlphaSense must be enabled there before any user in your firm can complete the connection. See Step 1. (Affinity: Getting Started with Affinity MCP)
- Your own Affinity account. Each AlphaSense user connects with their own Affinity login. You do not need to be an Affinity admin to connect — a Standard role is enough. (Affinity: Account level permissions)
- You will only see what you can already see. AlphaSense returns only the companies, people, opportunities, lists, and notes your Affinity role and list-level sharing already grant you. Two colleagues at the same firm can legitimately get different answers to the same question. (Affinity: Account level permissions)
Step 1: Affinity Admin Setup
Complete these steps once for your firm, before asking users to connect. Until they are done, users will see an authorization error when they try to connect.
- Sign in to Affinity as an Admin (or Enterprise Admin on the Enterprise tier).
- Confirm your firm is on a Scale, Advanced, or Enterprise plan. If you are on Essential, contact your Affinity Customer Success Manager to upgrade — API and MCP access are not available on Essential. (Affinity: Getting started with the Affinity API + FAQs)
- Go to Settings → Affinity MCP.
- Enable AlphaSense in the list of applications permitted to connect. This is the step that most often blocks a rollout — users cannot authorize AlphaSense until it is enabled here. (Affinity: Getting Started with Affinity MCP)
- Enterprise tier only: if your firm restricts which roles may use connected applications, confirm the roles you want to onboard are permitted under Settings → Users and Permissions → Account Role(for logged in user).
- Confirm the users you plan to onboard have access to the Affinity lists whose data they will need. List access is granted separately from the account role — being an Affinity account Admin does not by itself grant access to every list. (Affinity: Account level permissions)
Important: No AlphaSense user can connect Affinity until an Affinity admin completes step 4.
Step 2: Individual User Connection
Each user connects their own Affinity account. There is no shared or workspace-level Affinity connection — the connector is per-user by design, so that every answer is scoped to that person's Affinity permissions.
- In AlphaSense, go to your integrations settings and find the Affinity tile.
- Click Connect.
- You are redirected to Affinity to sign in. If you are already signed in to Affinity in your browser, you may go straight to the approval screen.
- Review and approve the access AlphaSense requests. AlphaSense asks for read access to your Affinity records and for permission to keep the connection alive so you do not have to re-authorize on every query.
- You are returned to AlphaSense and the Affinity tile shows as connected.
[Affinity sign-in shown during the connect flow]
[Affinity authorization screen shown during the connect flow]
[AlphaSense integrations page showing Affinity in a connected state]
You can now ask questions about your CRM in AlphaSense — for example, "What stage is the Acme opportunity at and who owns it?" or "Who at our firm can introduce me to someone at Acme?"
What's Accessible
Affinity content is queried live and is not ingested into AlphaSense's search index. The table below describes what AlphaSense can read from Affinity at query time.
| Object type | What AlphaSense can read |
|---|---|
| Companies | Company profiles, enriched company data, and which lists a company appears on |
| People | Contact profiles, field values, and which lists a person appears on |
| Opportunities | Deals, mandates and positions, their stage, owner, and list membership |
| Lists & list entries | Your deal pipelines and watchlists, their entries, and the field values on each entry |
| Saved views | Saved views configured on a list, and the entries matching a view's filters |
| Fields & field values | Field definitions, dropdown options, and the history of field value changes |
| Notes | Notes attached to companies, people, opportunities, and meetings |
| Meetings & transcripts | Past and upcoming meetings, their attendees, and transcript dialogue |
| Relationship intelligence | Which colleagues know a given person or company, and warm-introduction paths |
| Reminders | Follow-up reminders across your team |
| Files | File names and metadata only — AlphaSense cannot read file contents from Affinity (Affinity MCP Reference) |
Capabilities
AlphaSense uses Affinity's own hosted connector, and calls only its read operations. Every write operation Affinity offers — creating or updating companies, people, opportunities, notes, lists, fields, or reminders — is removed before AlphaSense's assistant can use it. AlphaSense cannot create, change, or delete anything in your Affinity CRM.
| What you can ask for | What AlphaSense does |
|---|---|
| Find a company | Searches your CRM by name, domain, or description, and returns the best matches or a complete filtered list |
| Find a person | Searches contacts across your organization by name or filter criteria |
| Find an opportunity | Searches deals and mandates by keyword, or lists them |
| Open a record | Returns the full profile and field values for a company, person, or list entry |
| Work with a list | Finds your lists, reads their entries, applies a saved view, and reads the fields tracked on them |
| Read notes | Retrieves notes on a record, finds notes by author or date, and keyword-searches note text |
| Search files | Keyword-searches file names and metadata |
| Look at meetings | Retrieves past and upcoming meetings for a record, and reads meeting transcript dialogue |
| Map relationships | Shows which colleagues have a relationship with a person or company, and surfaces warm-introduction paths (including a visual graph, on request) |
| Check reminders | Retrieves reminders, optionally scoped to a specific record |
| Audit field changes | Reads the history of field value changes within a bounded scope |
| Identify you | Confirms which Affinity account the connection is authenticated as, used to answer "my deals" / "my reminders" questions |
Two capability areas depend on Affinity add-ons being enabled for your firm:
- Keyword search across notes and files requires Deal Assist.
- Meeting and transcript access requires unified events onboarding.
Without these, those requests return no results even though the connection is healthy. (Affinity: Affinity MCP Reference)
How It Works
- Permissions are mirrored, live. Every request runs as you. Affinity evaluates your account role and your list-level sharing at the moment of the query and returns only what you are entitled to see. AlphaSense cannot elevate your access or see records you cannot. (Affinity MCP Reference, Account level permissions)
- Nothing is ingested. Affinity records are fetched at query time and used to compose your answer. They are not copied into AlphaSense's search index, and they do not become searchable AlphaSense documents.
- Query results are short-lived. Records returned during a query are retained in AlphaSense's observability traces for 10 days, then automatically deleted.
- Read-only. AlphaSense never creates, updates, or deletes anything in Affinity.
- Credentials stay server-side. Your Affinity authorization is held by AlphaSense's integration service and attached to requests there. It is never exposed to the assistant that composes your answer.
- Answers cite their source. Responses link back to the underlying Affinity record so you can open it directly in Affinity and verify it.
Review data security at https://trust.alpha-sense.com/
Items to Note
- Supported content: companies, people, opportunities, lists and list entries, saved views, fields and field values, notes, meetings and transcripts, reminders, relationship data, and file metadata.
- File contents are not readable. AlphaSense can see that a file is attached to a record and read its metadata, but cannot read the document itself. To make those documents searchable in AlphaSense, upload them or connect the content source they live in. (Affinity MCP Reference)
- One Affinity account per user. Each AlphaSense user maintains a single Affinity connection. To connect a different Affinity account, disconnect the current one first.
- Feature-gated capabilities. Note and file keyword search requires Deal Assist; meeting and transcript access requires unified events onboarding. (Affinity MCP Reference)
- Query volume is shared with Affinity's API. Affinity applies both a per-user and an organization-wide monthly request allowance, and these are shared with any other tool using your Affinity API access. Scale and Advanced plans include a fixed monthly allowance; Enterprise is typically unlimited. Very heavy usage across multiple tools can exhaust the pool. (Getting started with the Affinity API + FAQs)
- Large result sets are returned in pages. Affinity truncates long lists of related people or companies on a single record, and returns large searches page by page. For very broad questions ("every company in the pipeline"), AlphaSense reads as many pages as it can within a request and will tell you when more records may exist. (Affinity External API v2)
- Meeting queries are bounded by date. Meeting lookups are limited to a window of up to one year at a time.
- Numeric comparisons are done after retrieval. Affinity cannot filter numerically on custom fields at the source, so questions like "deals over $30M" are answered by reading the relevant list and comparing values afterward. Expect these to be slower and to depend on the deal value field being populated on your list.
- No cross-CRM joins. If you connect more than one CRM, AlphaSense queries them separately rather than joining records across them.
Modify or Revoke Access
To change what AlphaSense can see: adjust the user's permissions in Affinity. Because access is mirrored live, changes to their Affinity role or list access take effect on the next query — there is nothing to re-sync in AlphaSense.
To disconnect (user):
- Open your integrations settings in AlphaSense.
- Click Disconnect on the Affinity tile.
- AlphaSense's authorization is revoked and live querying of Affinity stops immediately. Because Affinity data is never ingested into AlphaSense's search index, there is nothing to remove. Any query results held in observability traces are automatically deleted after 10 days.
To revoke access for the whole firm (Affinity admin):
- In Affinity, go to Settings → Affinity MCP.
- Disable AlphaSense. Existing connections stop working and no new ones can be created. (Getting Started with Affinity MCP)
To remove one person's access: change their Affinity role or list access, or deactivate their Affinity account, under Settings → Users and Permissions. (Account level permissions)
Troubleshooting & FAQs
I can't connect Affinity in AlphaSense.
- Confirm an Affinity admin has enabled AlphaSense under Settings → Affinity MCP (Step 1). This is the most common cause.
- Confirm your firm is on an Affinity Scale, Advanced, or Enterprise plan. Essential does not include the access this connector needs.
- Confirm you can sign in to Affinity directly in a browser.
The Affinity authorization screen mentions more than read access. Does AlphaSense change my CRM?
- No. AlphaSense is read-only: every operation that could create, update, or delete an Affinity record is removed before the assistant can use it. AlphaSense cannot write to your CRM regardless of what the authorization screen lists. If your security team needs this in writing, ask your AlphaSense representative for the connector's security documentation.
I don't see records I expect.
- Check the record in Affinity while signed in as yourself. If you cannot see it there, AlphaSense cannot either — access is mirrored exactly.
- List access is separate from your account role. Ask the List Owner to share the relevant list with you. (Account level permissions)
- If you asked about a specific list by name, check the spelling. List matching is literal, so a typo returns nothing rather than a close match.
Searching notes or files returns nothing.
- Keyword search across notes and files requires Deal Assist on your Affinity org. Ask your Affinity admin whether it is enabled. (Affinity MCP Reference)
Meeting or transcript questions return nothing.
- Meeting and transcript access requires unified events onboarding in Affinity. Ask your Affinity admin or Affinity Customer Success Manager. (Affinity MCP Reference)
Can AlphaSense read documents attached to my Affinity records?
- No. AlphaSense sees file names and metadata only, not file contents. (Affinity MCP Reference)
Can two colleagues get different answers to the same question?
- Yes, and this is expected. Answers are scoped to each person's own Affinity role and list access. (Account level permissions)
Why did a query about my whole pipeline come back slowly or incomplete?
- Broad questions require reading many pages of records within Affinity's request allowance. AlphaSense reads as much as it can and tells you when more records may exist. Narrowing the question — to one list, stage, or time window — is faster and more reliable.
I'm getting errors about too many requests.
- Your Affinity request allowance is shared across every tool using your Affinity API access, including any internal scripts. Check with your Affinity admin whether another integration is consuming the pool. (Getting started with the Affinity API + FAQs)
What happens to my Affinity data when I disconnect?
- Nothing needs to be removed. Affinity data is never ingested into AlphaSense's search index. Disconnecting revokes the authorization and stops live querying; any results held in observability traces are deleted automatically after 10 days.
Sources
All Affinity platform facts in this guide are drawn from Affinity's official documentation:
- Affinity: Getting Started with Affinity MCP — required plan tiers, admin control of connected applications at Settings → Affinity MCP
- Affinity: Affinity MCP Reference — permission enforcement as the authenticating user, file metadata-only limitation, Deal Assist and unified events requirements
- Affinity: Getting started with the Affinity API + FAQs — plan-based request allowances, admin-controlled API access
- Affinity: Account level permissions — subscription tiers, account roles, list-level permissions
- Affinity: Available tools — the read and write operations Affinity's connector exposes
- Affinity: External API v2 — core object model and result truncation on related records
AlphaSense product behaviors described here — the read-only posture, the 10-day observability retention, disconnect behavior, and in-app tile labels — are not sourced from Affinity. Items marked [CONFIRM] should be verified against the live connector before publishing.
By following this guide, you can set up and manage your Affinity integration in AlphaSense while keeping your CRM data secure and scoped to each user's own permissions.