Setting up Pilot: bring your own key

Before your team can use Pilot's drafting and summarisation features, you need to connect a model provider. This takes about five minutes.

Where to find the settings

Navigate to Settings > Integrations > Pilot (sometimes listed as "AI" depending on your version). This is where you configure which model provider Konversio should use when Pilot makes inference requests.

You need to be an account administrator to access this screen.

Supported providers

Pilot supports the following out of the box:

• OpenAI — GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini are the most commonly used models. Requires an OpenAI API key.
• Anthropic — Claude models (Sonnet, Haiku). Requires an Anthropic API key.
• Mistral — Mistral Large and Mistral Small. Requires a Mistral API key. Mistral is a French company with EU-hosted API infrastructure, making it a strong default for European teams.
• Local models via Ollama — Any model you are running locally or on your own server through Ollama (Gemma, Qwen, Llama, etc.). No external API key required.

Entering your API key

1. Select your provider from the dropdown.
2. Paste your API key into the key field. The key is stored encrypted in your database and is never displayed again after saving.
3. Select your default model from the list that populates after the key is validated.
4. Click Save.

For Ollama, instead of an API key you provide a base URL — typically something like http://localhost:11434 or the address of your self-hosted inference server.

Testing the connection

After saving, use the Test connection button. Konversio will send a minimal request to your configured endpoint and confirm it gets a valid response. If the test fails, the most common causes are:

• An incorrect or expired API key
• A model name mismatch (especially with Ollama, where model names must match exactly what is installed)
• A firewall or network rule blocking outbound requests from your Konversio instance to the provider endpoint

Choosing a default model

The default model is used across all Pilot features unless overridden. Faster, cheaper models (GPT-4o-mini, Mistral Small, Gemma 3 2B) are usually fine for drafting and summarisation. Larger models produce better output on complex or nuanced tickets but cost more per request.

A note for EU teams

If your organisation has requirements around where customer data is processed, the model provider choice matters. Every time Pilot drafts a reply or summarises a conversation, the content of those messages is sent to your configured provider.

OpenAI and Anthropic are US companies. Their APIs process data on US infrastructure by default, though enterprise agreements with DPA addenda exist. Mistral offers EU-hosted API endpoints and is subject to French and EU law. Running Ollama on your own infrastructure means the data never leaves your environment at all. The setup for Ollama is covered in the EU model options article.