How to Connect to Live Paylocity Data in Mistral AI Workflows and Agents (via CData Connect AI)

Mistral AI is a frontier AI company that builds enterprise-grade open-source and commercial large language models (LLMs). With Mistral, you can train, fine-tune, and deploy agents anywhere – on premises, in the cloud, or at the edge – while retaining full control of your data. Its agent-ready platform enables multilingual and multimodal AI that can search, create, code, automate, and collaborate securely, with support for memory and extended context handling.

CData Connect AI provides a secure cloud-to-cloud interface for easily integrating hundreds of enterprise data sources with Mistral AI. Through CData Connect AI, Mistral AI agents can query, analyze, and act on live Paylocity data in real time, without replication. Connect AI manages authentication, security, and query optimization so you can focus on building intelligent workflows, while Mistral handles reasoning and natural language interaction.

In this guide, we will use Mistral AI's Le Chat, Mistral's customizable conversational chatbot, along with CData Connect AI to connect to live Paylocity data. You will be able to interact with your live Paylocity data directly in Mistral AI workflows – running queries and automating tasks securely.

The setup takes just a few minutes, and once connected, you will have your own chatbot agent intelligently conversing with your live Paylocity data.

Let's begin.

Prerequisites

1. A Mistral AI account – Sign up or log in here.
2. A CData Connect AI account – Sign up or log in here.
3. An active Paylocity account with valid credentials.

Overview

Here is a quick overview of the steps we will follow:

1. Connect: Add a connection to Paylocity in CData Connect AI using your credentials.
2. Configure: Create a custom MCP connection in Mistral AI Le Chat that points to your Paylocity connection in CData Connect AI.
3. Query: Interact with live Paylocity data in Mistral AI workflows – running queries and taking actions using natural language.

Step 1: Configure Paylocity Connectivity for Mistral

Connectivity to Paylocity from Mistral AI is made possible through CData Connect AI Remote MCP. To interact with Paylocity data from Mistral, we start by creating and configuring a Paylocity connection in CData Connect AI.

1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection.
👁 Adding a Connection

2. Select "Paylocity" from the Add Connection panel.
👁 Selecting a data source

3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Paylocity.

   Set the following to establish a connection to Paylocity:

   • RSAPublicKey: Set this to the RSA Key associated with your Paylocity, if the RSA Encryption is enabled in the Paylocity account.

     This property is required for executing Insert and Update statements, and it is not required if the feature is disabled.

   • UseSandbox: Set to true if you are using sandbox account.
   • CustomFieldsCategory: Set this to the Customfields category. This is required when IncludeCustomFields is set to true. The default value for this property is PayrollAndHR.
   • Key: The AES symmetric key(base 64 encoded) encrypted with the Paylocity Public Key. It is the key used to encrypt the content.

     Paylocity will decrypt the AES key using RSA decryption.
     It is an optional property if the IV value not provided, The driver will generate a key internally.

   • IV: The AES IV (base 64 encoded) used when encrypting the content. It is an optional property if the Key value not provided, The driver will generate an IV internally.

   Connect Using OAuth Authentication

   You must use OAuth to authenticate with Paylocity. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Paylocity using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the Help documentation.

   The Pay Entry API

   The Pay Entry API is completely separate from the rest of the Paylocity API. It uses a separate Client ID and Secret, and must be explicitly requested from Paylocity for access to be granted for an account. The Pay Entry API allows you to automatically submit payroll information for individual employees, and little else. Due to the extremely limited nature of what is offered by the Pay Entry API, we have elected not to give it a separate schema, but it may be enabled via the UsePayEntryAPI connection property.

   Please be aware that when setting UsePayEntryAPI to true, you may only use the CreatePayEntryImportBatch & MergePayEntryImportBatchgtable stored procedures, the InputTimeEntry table, and the OAuth stored procedures. Attempts to use other features of the product will result in an error. You must also store your OAuthAccessToken separately, which often means setting a different OAuthSettingsLocation when using this connection property. 👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
   

4. Click Save & Test.
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Paylocity Connection page and update the user-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions
   

Add a Personal Access Token

A Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI from Mistral AI. It is a best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain fine-grained access control.

1. Click on the gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the Settings page.
2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
3. Give the PAT a descriptive name and click Create. 👁 Creating a new PAT
   
4. Note: The PAT is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to Paylocity data from Mistral AI workflows.

Step 2: Configure the MCP Connector in Mistral Le Chat

With your Paylocity connection and PAT created in CData Connect AI, the next step is to configure a custom MCP connector inside Mistral Le Chat.

1. Log into Le Chat. 👁 Logging into Mistral Le Chat
   
2. From the left-hand menu, click on Intelligence, then select Connectors. Click Add Connector. 👁 Adding a new connector
   
3. In the dialog, select Custom MCP Connector and enter the following details:
   • Connector Name: For example, CData_Remote_MCP.
   • Connector Server: https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp (found in the "Connect Data to AI" ribbon in Connect AI).
   • Authentication Method: API Token Authentication.
   • Header Name: Authorization.
   • Header Value: Basic [email protected]:YourPAT (replace "[email protected]" with your CData Connect AI email and "YourPAT" with the PAT created earlier in above format).
   👁 Configuring the MCP connection
   
4. Click Connect to establish the connection.
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the Connections section to confirm that your MCP connection is successfully established. 👁 MCP connection established
   

This step ensures that Mistral Le Chat can securely route queries through the CData Remote MCP Server to your live Paylocity data.

Step 3: Query Live Paylocity Data from Mistral AI

Now that your MCP connector is configured in Le Chat, you can begin querying live Paylocity data directly in your conversations.

1. In Le Chat, click on Chats in the left menu to start a new chat.
2. Enable your MCP connector by clicking the Enable Tools button. 👁 Enabling MCP tools in Le Chat
   
3. Run a discovery query such as Get Catalogs or Get Tables to see the available data sources and schemas connected through CData Connect AI. 👁 Listing connected catalogs and tables
   
4. Test the connection by running a simple query. For example: "Compare the win rate of Opportunities across different industries." 👁 Viewing visual query results (Salesforce is shown)
   👁 Viewing tabular query results (Salesforce is shown)
   

And that's it! You can now interact with live Paylocity data conversationally inside Mistral Le Chat.

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Build Complex AI Agents with CData Connect AI

With the integration complete, you can go beyond simple queries and build complex, multi-step AI agents. These agents can combine reasoning from Mistral AI with secure, real-time access to your enterprise data through CData Connect AI, enabling workflows such as sales forecasting, support triage, customer trend analysis, and more.

Try CData Connect AI for free today and use the full power of Mistral AI agents with secure, live access to your enterprise data.