What Connectors Actually See and What They Don't

You connect Gmail and ask Cowork to pull the pricing out of the contract your client attached. It answers confidently, and quotes the email body, not the PDF. The number it gives you is from the cover note, not the actual terms.

Or you ask it to summarize the decision on a Google Doc: the one where the whole argument happened in the comment thread. Cowork summarizes the document body and never mentions the comments. The thing you actually wanted was invisible to it.

Nothing is broken here. You assumed a connector hands Cowork the entire tool. It doesn't.

A connector is a door into specific rooms, not a master key. Learn the floor plan once and you stop being surprised.

#The whole-tool assumption

Most people install a connector and treat it as "Cowork can now see my Gmail," full stop. That's the wrong model. A connector exposes a defined set of actions over a defined slice of the tool's data. Some things it reads natively, some it can only see the label of, some it can't touch at all.