How do I use the Klips AI Chrome extension?

Klips AI is a Google Chrome extension that puts an AI assistant inside your Klipfolio Klips account. It reads your data sources, dashboards, and Klips through the Klipfolio API, answers questions about your actual numbers, and builds new visualizations on request.

This guide covers installation, setup, and everything the assistant can do, including.

• First-time setup
• Where the assistant lives
• What Klips AI can do
• Chart types it can build
• Where your data goes
• Troubleshooting

Install the extension

1. Open the Klips AI listing in the Chrome Web Store and click Add to Chrome.
2. Approve the permission prompt. Klips AI requests four site permissions and nothing broader. See Where your data goes  for the full list.
3. Pin the extension: click the puzzle-piece icon in the Chrome toolbar, then the pin next to Klips AI. The toolbar icon is your recovery route if you ever lose the extension window on the page.
4. Go to app.klipfolio.com. A window or small teal ✦ bubble appears in the bottom-right corner. Click it to begin.
    

First-time setup

Three things are required before the Launch Assistant button becomes active.

Step 1: Connect to Klipfolio

Click Connect to Klipfolio. A Chrome sign-in window opens and you authorize the extension against your Klipfolio account using OAuth. When it closes, the status line reads ✅ Connected to Klipfolio.

Your Klipfolio account also needs a Klips API key. This is a separate one-time step, not something the setup screen can do for you. If you do not yet have an API key, the first question you ask will return a message saying so, with a link to How do I generate a Klipfolio Klips API key.

Step 2: Pick a model

Choose which AI model answers your questions. The list is grouped by provider.

"Recommended" applies within the provider group you are using. If your organization has accounts with both providers, either recommended model is a reasonable starting point.

Pick the model before you paste your key. The model determines which provider's key the field will ask for.

Step 3: Paste your provider API key

The key field relabels itself to match the model you chose: Anthropic API Key or OpenAI API Key. Paste the corresponding key.

You bring your own key. Usage is billed to your own provider account. Both keys are stored separately, so you can switch providers later without re-pasting either one.

Step 4: Launch

Click Launch Assistant. Your connection, key, model, and conversation history all persist. The next time you open the panel you go straight into the chat.
 

Optional: Personalize replies

Once you are in the chat, click the pencil icon in the top-right corner of the panel to set:

• Reply tone: Professional (default), Concise, Friendly, Analytical, or Executive.
• Custom instructions: Free text the assistant keeps in mind on every reply, for example: "Our fiscal year starts in April" or "Always show currency in CAD."

These govern presentation only. They cannot make the assistant report numbers it did not retrieve or skip a data lookup.

Where the assistant lives

Klips AI runs in one of two modes. You can switch between them at any time.

Floating to sidebar: press ⇥ in the panel's title bar. The bubble disappears and a note appears at the top right of the browser, next to the toolbar icon, explaining how to open the sidebar. The note clears itself the moment the sidebar opens, or you can dismiss it with ×. The floating panel stays put until you navigate away, so you are never left with a blank screen.

Sidebar to floating: press ⇱ Pop out to page in the sidebar's title bar. The chat reopens on the page immediately, with your conversation intact.

Moving and resizing the panel

The panel stays open as you move around Klipfolio. Click into another dashboard, open a data source, or reload the page — the chat remains in the same place, at the same size, with your conversation intact.

Right-click the bubble

The toolbar icon

In floating mode, clicking the toolbar icon hides the entire extension — panel and bubble together. Clicking it again restores exactly what you hid: if the chat was open, you get the chat with the cursor in the message box; if you only had the bubble, you get the bubble.

Lost the bubble? Click the toolbar icon. In floating mode it brings the bubble back directly. In sidebar mode it opens the side panel instead — use ⇱ Pop out to page from there to return to floating mode.

Chat controls

The top of the chat panel contains four controls:

• Clear: Start a fresh conversation.
• Help: Links to Klipfolio support resources and a contact form.
• ✎: Reply tone and custom instructions. Hover to see which tone is currently active.
• ⚙: Settings — change your Klipfolio connection, model, or API key.

Your conversation is shared between floating and sidebar modes, so switching mid-conversation keeps everything.

What Klips AI can do

Explore your data sources

Ask questions like "What data sources do I have?" or "What's in the Sales Data source?" and the assistant lists your data sources, pulls the actual rows, and reports what it finds — trends, totals, highs, and lows — in plain language.

Dynamic data sources work too. A dynamic source is one query that fans out into several instances, each run with different variable values. The assistant handles this automatically: it detects that the master source has no data of its own, looks up the instances, and reads one. If your question is about specific numbers, it tells you which instance it read and offers the others, because the choice changes the answer.

Summarize a dashboard

Ask "Summarize my Revenue dashboard" and the assistant resolves the dashboard, finds every Klip on it, reads each Klip's definition to learn what metric it visualizes and which data source it draws from, fetches that data, and summarizes the real values.

The assistant is specifically instructed not to say "there is a bar chart showing revenue" but rather "revenue grew from $X in January to $Y in December, peaking in August." You get the analysis, not an inventory of chart types.

Ask about what's on your screen

You do not have to name a resource. Ask "Summarize this dashboard" or "What am I looking at?" and the assistant reads the page you have open to identify which dashboard and Klips you mean, then looks them up through the API before saying anything about them.

If more than one dashboard matches the name it finds, or none does, it asks you to clarify rather than guessing.

Explain your Klips

Ask "List my Klips and describe them" or "What does the Pipeline Velocity Klip actually measure?" and the assistant retrieves each Klip's definition and explains it in plain language.

Build new Klips

Describe what you want:

• "Build me a bar chart of monthly revenue from the Sales data"
• "Create a gauge showing current MRR against a $50k target"
• "Make a table comparing this quarter's sales to target, with the gaps in red"

The assistant inspects the data source to learn the real column layout and types, picks an appropriate visualization, generates the Klip, creates it in your account, and gives you a direct link. It then asks whether you would like it added to a dashboard.

You do not need to name the chart type. Describe what you want to see and the assistant picks one. See Chart types it can build for the full list.

Rearrange a dashboard

Ask "Move the revenue chart to the top left", "Swap those two Klips", or "Put this dashboard into three columns" and the assistant can move, reorder, and resize the Klips on a dashboard.

Two things worth knowing:

• It reads the current layout before changing it. Klipfolio's layout API replaces the whole arrangement in one write, so anything left out of that write is removed from the dashboard. The assistant always reads the existing layout first, changes only what you asked for, and checks that no Klip went missing before saving. If a change would have dropped one, it stops and tells you instead.
• Small moves happen directly; large ones are confirmed first. Moving a single Klip happens without prompting. Changing the column count, or reordering a dashboard with many Klips, gets a one-line description and waits for your approval.

Changing the column split on an older dashboard layout may not be possible because those layout codes are not published in the Klipfolio API. The assistant will not guess at one and will offer to reposition Klips within the existing columns instead.

This capability requires the dashboard.share permission on your account. Without it the call returns a permission error and the assistant tells you so.

Create data sources

• Static or sample data: the assistant can generate CSV or JSON data and create a file data source from it.
• Live API feeds: the assistant can create a connected data source that refreshes on a schedule (hourly by default). For REST APIs with an API key or bearer token this works directly. For OAuth connectors such as HubSpot, Shopify, and Google Analytics, you must first authorize the connector in Klipfolio → Settings → Integrations. After that, the assistant can reuse that authorization.

Share dashboards

The assistant can list, create, update, and delete published dashboard links. Before creating one it asks two questions — public or private, and whether you want a password — and waits for both answers rather than assuming defaults.

Administration

If your Klipfolio account has admin rights, the assistant can also manage users, groups, roles, and client accounts: create and update users, assign roles, resend invitations, reset passwords, manage group membership, and manage client settings, resources, and share rights.

Two behaviours worth knowing:

• New users do not receive an invite email automatically. The assistant will ask whether to send one and issues it on your confirmation.
• Updating a role replaces its entire permission list. The assistant reads the role's current permissions first and sends the merged list, so nothing is silently dropped.

Without admin rights these calls return a permission error, and the assistant will tell you that is what happened.

What it will not do

• Invent data or IDs. If a lookup fails, the assistant tells you the call failed and which endpoint it asked for, rather than guessing at a cause.
• Report numbers it did not retrieve, including under custom instructions.
• Delete things without asking. Deletions and other destructive operations are confirmed with you first.

Chart types it can build

Where your data goes

There is one path to your Klipfolio data, and the extension is not on it:

model provider  ──►  Klipfolio MCP server  ──►  Klipfolio Public API
     ▲
     └── the extension supplies the authorization token only

The extension performs the OAuth sign-in, stores the token in Chrome's extension storage (not in page storage, so no website script can read it), and attaches it to each model request. The model provider's backend then calls Klipfolio. The token never enters the model's context and never reaches the Klipfolio page.

What is transmitted to your chosen model provider:

• your messages and conversation history
• the Klipfolio data and definitions retrieved to answer them
• the page context read when you point at something on screen rather than naming it

Your provider API key is sent only to that provider. It is stored locally in Chrome extension storage and is never sent to Klipfolio.

Site permissions requested

The extension also requests storage (settings, token, and chat history), identity (the OAuth window), and sidePanel. Nothing broader is requested.

Troubleshooting

• The bubble is not on the page. Confirm you are on app.klipfolio.com and using Klips. If you are on the right page, check whether you are in sidebar mode — the bubble is hidden there on purpose. Click the toolbar icon. If the side panel opens, that confirms sidebar mode is active. Use ⇱ Pop out to page to return to floating mode and the bubble.
• "Launch Assistant" is greyed out. Both requirements are not met yet. You need a Klipfolio connection and an API key for the selected model's provider. If you recently switched from a Claude model to a GPT model, the key field is now asking for a different key.
• I switched to sidebar mode and the sidebar did not open. This is expected. Chrome does not let anything on the page open the side panel. Switching the mode and opening the panel are two separate steps. Click the Klips AI toolbar icon. The note at the top right of the browser says the same thing and disappears once the sidebar opens.
• "API key is invalid" or the assistant says your account has no Klips API key. A Klips API key generated on your Klipfolio account is required, and that is a separate one-time step from the OAuth connection. Reconnecting your account will not fix this. Follow How do I generate a Klipfolio Klips API key, then try again.
• If the error message names Anthropic or OpenAI instead, that is your provider key. Re-check it in ⚙ Settings.
• It says a call failed. The assistant reports the failure honestly rather than guessing at a cause. If it keeps happening, ask "What tool name and input schema were you given?" — the assistant will quote them verbatim, which is what support needs to diagnose a version mismatch.
• "Your Klipfolio connection does not have admin rights." The admin endpoints require admin permissions on the connected account. Ask an administrator or reconnect with an account that has them.
• It asked which dashboard I meant. Page detection found an ambiguous or missing name. Name the dashboard explicitly and the assistant will proceed. This is deliberate — it asks rather than guessing at a resource it might modify.
• Replies are getting slow or truncated on Haiku. Claude Haiku 4.5 has the smallest context window of the six available models. Switch to Claude Sonnet 5, or click Clear to start a fresh conversation.
• Nothing refreshed after it built a Klip. You are probably in the Klip editor or the data source setup wizard, where auto-refresh is blocked on purpose. Save your work and reload manually.

Getting help

Inside the chat, Help links to:

• Klipfolio support resources
• Talk to support

For questions about Klipfolio formula syntax, the functions reference is the authority — and it is the same reference the assistant works from.