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You just built a Function and made it callable from your reps' AI tools. But right now it's wide open: every rep can call it as often as they want, against any credits you have available. This lesson is about the guardrails.

Before we start, let’s reframe “governance.”

It usually sounds like a chore, but it's the whole point of MCP for Ops. Governance is what lets you say yes to reps moving fast and experimenting, without worrying about accidental writes to your CRM, runaway credit usage, or someone connecting tools to data they should never touch.

There are three levels of governance control: roles, credits, and functions.

👤 Roles

Roles decide what a rep can and can't do in the workspace.

1. Go to Settings, then Team. From here you can see everyone on the team and invite reps, AEs, or whoever you want.
2. Set each person's role. For most reps, set them to viewer.
3. Change a role anytime. Open your list of teammates and adjust as needed.

Viewer access lets a rep use your workspace resources like Audiences and Functions, but not edit any of them. That's exactly what you want: capability without the ability to change your setup.

💳 Credits

Credits are controlled with budgets, so a rep can only spend what you've allotted.

1. Go to Budgets and create a budget. For example, a marketing team budget.
2. Assign an amount. In the demo, we gave the budget 100,000 credits.
3. Assign people or groups to it. Add individuals from your team, or create a group and assign people to the group.

Once a rep uses up the credits in their budget, they're capped and can't keep using Clay inside their tools (ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever they're on).

Where to start: start conservative and loosen as real usage patterns emerge. A rough starting point is around 500 credits per rep per month for light prospecting, and 2,000 to 5,000 for heavy SDRs. Watch actual usage before you lock limits in permanently.

⚙️ Function-Level Control

The third level is per-Function. Some Functions are expensive: finding phone numbers burns credits, and an enrichment like HG Insights costs eight credits per tool found. For a Function like that, you may want to restrict who can trigger it.

To take a Function out of MCP:

1. Go to Functions and open the one you want to control.
2. Go into its settings and edit the Function.
3. Toggle off its availability in the MCP and save.

Now reps can't call that Function from their chat tool, so an expensive or off-standard workflow can't be triggered by accident.

🚀 What's Next

You've now got all three layers of control: roles that scope what reps can touch, credit budgets that cap what they can spend, and function-level control over what they can trigger. This is what lets you say yes to reps moving fast and still sleep at night.

Next, we'll bring it all home: enabling your reps, handing them off to their own course on how to use MCP, and setting up a loop that keeps the whole system getting better the more they use it.