aep

Adobe's MCP lets your agent read Experience Platform. This one lets it work.

61 tools across 14 categories. Full read AND write. Self-hosted, Apache-2.0, no invitation required. Experience Platform, Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics — from one OAuth credential.

Ingest a batch → compose a schema → activate an audience → honour an erasure. Every mutation gated by a fail-closed write guard that asks Adobe what kind of sandbox it's in.

---

⚡ Do it in three lines

claude mcp add aep \
  -e AEP_CLIENT_ID=... -e AEP_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  -e AEP_ORG_ID=...@AdobeOrg -e AEP_SANDBOX_NAME=your-dev-sandbox \
  -- npx -y @focusgts/aep-mcp-server

Then just ask your agent:

"Create a schema with the Demographic Details field group, then a dataset on it." "Ingest this NDJSON file and tell me when the batch lands." "Build an audience of customers who bought twice this quarter and activate it." "Delete every record for this email address — dry run first."

Writes are off until you ask for them, and safe mode only unlocks sandboxes Adobe classifies as development.

The loop that makes it different

flowchart LR
  A["📐 Compose<br/>schema from field groups"] --> B["🗂️ Create<br/>dataset"]
  B --> C["📥 Ingest<br/>batch · upload · complete"]
  C --> D["🎯 Activate<br/>segment → destination"]
  D --> E["🧹 Govern<br/>erasure · expiration · quota"]
  E -. "re-audit the tenant" .-> A

Adobe's first-party gateway can tell you what's in your Experience Platform tenant. It cannot create a dataset, land a batch, activate an audience, or submit an erasure. This does — and does it behind a guard that fails closed.

---

🧠 How it works

flowchart LR
  A["AI agent<br/>(Claude · Cursor · Copilot)"] -- MCP / stdio --> B["aep-mcp-server<br/>61 tools"]
  B --> W{{"write guard<br/>fail-closed"}}
  W --> C["Schema Registry · Catalog<br/>Ingestion · Lifecycle · Privacy"]
  C --> F["Your AEP sandbox<br/>platform.adobe.io"]
  B --> J["Journey Optimizer<br/>read-only"]
  J --> K["ajo campaigns"]
  B --> Q["Customer Journey Analytics<br/>read-only, no sandbox"]
  Q --> L["cja.adobe.io"]

The agent calls tools; the server talks to live Adobe APIs over OAuth Server-to-Server. The write guard sits in the HTTP client, not in each tool, so all 61 inherit it and none can forget it. Blocked calls never reach Adobe.

---

🛡️ Safe by default

Three postures. Reads are never restricted in any mode.

AEP_MODE	Writes permitted	Use it when
read-only	Never, in any sandbox	Handing the server to someone to explore an environment you don't want touched
safe (default)	Only where Adobe classifies the sandbox development	Evaluating, or letting an agent work without risking production
production	Anywhere, including production	You run your own change control and don't want the server second-guessing you

How safe decides — and why it's not the sandbox name. A production sandbox can be called anything, and a sandbox called prod might not be production. Only Adobe's type field from the Sandbox Management API decides.

It fails closed. If the type can't be determined — the credential can't read sandbox metadata, the API errors, startup hasn't finished — writes are blocked. A credential must not earn write access by being less capable. An unrecognised AEP_MODE falls back to safe, so a typo can never grant production writes.

A sandbox literally named prod is refused unconditionally, before mode resolution — so AEP_MODE=production does not lift it. Override with AEP_I_UNDERSTAND_THIS_WRITES_TO_PROD=true only if that really is your sandbox's name. The inference is deliberately asymmetric: trusting a name to allow a write is unsafe, trusting one to deny a write is safe, because the worst case is a refusal you can override on purpose.

Mutations are off entirely unless AEP_ALLOW_MUTATIONS=true. That is separate from AEP_MODE on purpose: choosing a write mode should not also mean "yes, you may change my data".

Startup always states the active posture:

SAFE MODE — sandbox is a development sandbox, so writes are ENABLED.
SAFE MODE — sandbox is PRODUCTION, so writes are BLOCKED. Reads work normally.
SAFE MODE — sandbox type could not be confirmed, so writes are BLOCKED (fail-closed).
READ-ONLY MODE — no write, update, or delete will be performed in any sandbox.
PRODUCTION MODE — writes permitted against ANY sandbox, including production.

Per-tool confirmation gates

Writes are not uniformly gated — uniform gating makes an agent useless. Gates sit where an action is irreversible and wide-reaching, and every one is checked before any network call:

Tool	Gate
aep_create_record_delete	dryRun defaults true. Real submission needs confirm: "DELETE RECORDS <datasetId> <identityDigest>" — bound to the dataset and a SHA-256 digest of the exact identity set, so a confirmation can't be reused for a different deletion. ALL and multi-dataset targets are refused.
aep_delete_segment	confirm: "DELETE SEGMENT <segmentId>" — segments were create-only until 0.9.1, so every one an agent made was permanent
aep_delete_dataset	confirm: "DELETE DATASET <id>", escalating to "DELETE PROFILE-ENABLED DATASET <id>" when the dataset feeds Profile
aep_complete_batch	confirm: "COMPLETE BATCH <batchId>" — the point of no return for ingestion
aep_revert_batch	confirm: "REVERT BATCH <batchId>"
aep_create_dataset_expiration	confirm: "CREATE DATASET EXPIRATION <datasetId>" — unless dryRun: true
aep_update_dataset_expiration	confirm: "UPDATE DATASET EXPIRATION <ttlId>"
aep_cancel_dataset_expiration	confirm: "CANCEL DATASET EXPIRATION <ttlId>"
aep_delete_profile	confirm: "I understand this is irreversible" (deprecated — prefer Data Hygiene)

Confirmations name their target. A phrase carrying the dataset id — and for record delete, a hash of the identities too — cannot be copied from one call to another. A generic "I understand this is irreversible" approves any deletion once you've typed it once.

Identity values never leave the process. aep_create_record_delete returns a count, the namespace names, and a digest — never the email addresses or device IDs you passed it. A record-delete request is by nature a list of real people; a tool that echoes them copies them into every transcript and log sink it touches.

Batch creation and file upload are ungated on purpose: those writes are additive and recoverable. An unwanted batch can be left uncompleted, and data that did land can be removed with the Data Hygiene tools.

Tool annotations

Every tool ships MCP annotations — readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, idempotentHint, openWorldHint — derived from the same metadata that builds its description, so the two cannot drift.

	Count
readOnlyHint: true	39
destructiveHint: true	8
Un-annotated	0

These are hints for the client, not enforcement — the guards above enforce. Their value is that a client like Claude Desktop uses destructiveHint to decide when to interrupt and ask a human. Without them aep_delete_profile looks identical to aep_list_schemas. A test asserts the destructive list exactly, so a ninth is a deliberate act rather than an oversight.

---

🛠️ The 61 tools

All prefixed aep_, verb_noun naming. 🔒 changes state · 🔥 destructive.

Data modelling & ingestion

Schemas (4)

• list_schemas
• get_schema
• create_schema 🔒
• update_schema 🔒

Datasets (4)

• list_datasets
• get_dataset
• create_dataset 🔒
• delete_dataset 🔥

Ingestion (7)

• create_batch 🔒
• upload_batch_file 🔒
• complete_batch 🔥
• get_batch_status
• list_batches
• abort_batch 🔥
• revert_batch 🔥

Sources (2)

• list_sources
• list_dataflows

Query Service (3)

• run_query 🔒
• get_query_status
• list_queries

Profiles, audiences & activation

Identities (2)

• list_identity_namespaces
• get_identity_graph

Profiles (4)

• get_profile
• get_profile_by_identity
• preview_profile
• delete_profile 🔥

Segments (5)

• list_segments
• get_segment
• create_segment 🔒
• estimate_segment_size
• delete_segment 🔥

Destinations (3)

• list_destinations
• create_destination_connection 🔒
• activate_segment 🔒

Governance — privacy, lifecycle & event routing

Privacy Service (6)

• create_privacy_job 🔒
• get_privacy_job
• list_privacy_jobs
• cancel_privacy_job 🔒
• get_privacy_job_results
• list_privacy_namespaces

Data Hygiene (9)

• create_record_delete 🔥
• get_work_order_status
• list_work_orders
• get_data_lifecycle_quota
• create_dataset_expiration 🔥
• get_dataset_expiration
• list_dataset_expirations
• update_dataset_expiration 🔥
• cancel_dataset_expiration 🔥

Workflows these unlock

Ingest end to end — create_schema → create_dataset → create_batch → upload_batch_file → complete_batch → get_batch_status

Build and activate an audience — create_segment → estimate_segment_size → list_destinations → create_destination_connection → activate_segment

Honour an erasure request — get_profile_by_identity → create_record_delete → get_work_order_status

Retire data on a schedule — create_dataset_expiration → list_dataset_expirations → update_dataset_expiration → cancel_dataset_expiration

What's actually been run against a live tenant is recorded per tool in docs/VALIDATION-MATRIX.md — including the surfaces that are documented-and-mocked but deliberately never executed, and why.

Adobe Journey Optimizer (2)

AJO is a separate Adobe product, licensed separately — hence the ajo_ prefix, so an entitlement failure reads as one.

Campaigns

• ajo_list_campaigns
• ajo_get_campaign

Campaigns is the only AJO surface reachable on our tenant. Journeys, messages, channel surfaces, content templates, fragments, offers and decisions all return an HTML 404 — the gateway has no such route — so they are deliberately not implemented.

Writes are absent on purpose. The routes exist, but shipping an unvalidated write path into a product that sends messages to real people is not a trade worth making.

---

📊 AEC-Bench — does your agent actually work?

Every MCP server in this space is described by its tool count. That measures surface area, not competence: fifty tools that 404 score higher than ten that work.

bench/ is an agentic benchmark that measures the other thing — given a real task and a live tenant, does the agent finish it, and can you prove it?

npm run bench          # tier 1, read-only, safe on any tenant
npm run bench:write    # tier 2, creates and removes what it creates

Assertions run against Adobe	A "create a segment" task is scored by a GET that finds it — never by the create call's own success flag. A write reporting on itself is not evidence.
Cleanup is scored	Completing the goal while leaving an orphan is not a pass. A benchmark that dirties the tenant can only run once honestly.
Tier 1 is production-safe	GET only. A benchmark nobody dares run measures nothing.

Current: tier 1 5/5, tier 2 2/2, zero residue. Tier 3 (irreversible) is defined and deliberately empty — its tasks are non-cancellable and can take 30 days, and a benchmark is not a good reason to run one.

We expect to score badly on tasks we haven't built for. That's the intended use.

📈 Customer Journey Analytics (10)

One OAuth credential now serves three Adobe services. Add the Customer Journey Analytics API to the same Developer Console project that owns AEP_CLIENT_ID, and the cja_* tools light up — no second secret, no separate auth.

Discover

• cja_list_companies
• cja_list_connections
• cja_get_connection
• cja_list_data_views
• cja_get_data_view

Report

• cja_list_dimensions
• cja_list_metrics
• cja_list_segments
• cja_list_calculated_metrics
• cja_run_report

The AEP sandbox and the CJA company are not the same thing

	AEP	CJA
Host	platform.adobe.io	cja.adobe.io
Scope unit	sandbox (AEP_SANDBOX_NAME)	global company id — or the IMS org
Header	x-sandbox-name	x-proxy-global-company-id (optional — see below)
Maps to the other?	No. A CJA connection or data view has no one-to-one relationship with any AEP sandbox.

The CJA client never sends x-sandbox-name. CJA has no sandbox concept, and attaching one would be meaningless at best and misleading in a trace.

Company discovery, and why it may not work

Adobe's documented discovery endpoint is GET https://analytics.adobe.io/discovery/me. That host belongs to Adobe Analytics — a different product from CJA. A credential entitled to CJA but not Analytics gets 403003 Api Key is invalid there: the key is fine, it simply has no Analytics entitlement. CJA exposes no discovery of its own.

In practice this blocks nothing: CJA answers every resource with x-gw-ims-org-id alone, so the company id is optional.

# Optional. Omit it and CJA scopes by IMS org, which is what works by default.
CJA_GLOBAL_COMPANY_ID=your-global-company-id

cja_list_companies reports which context is in use and whether discovery is reachable. If discovery ever returns several companies and no override is set, it refuses to pick one — silently choosing the first would point every subsequent report at the wrong company.

Running the probes and the live tests

node scripts/probe-cja.mjs --env .env          # read-only, sanitized output
CJA_LIVE_TESTS=1 npm test -- tests/integration/cja-live.test.ts

The live tests are skipped unless CJA_LIVE_TESTS=1, so npm test stays hermetic. They are read-only and never print credentials or full Adobe responses.

Current limitations, honestly

• No mutation tools. This slice is read-only by design.
• Discovery is unavailable on a CJA-only credential, as above. Not a defect in the tools.
• cja_get_connection is unvalidated — the validation tenant has zero connections, and an id is never fabricated to manufacture a pass.
• Paging on dimensions and metrics is inert. CJA wraps them in a content envelope that looks pageable, but limit and page are ignored — verified live, all 38 dimensions returned regardless. search, limit and offset are applied client-side, and the output says so.

---

🥊 vs Adobe's first-party Experience Platform tools

Adobe ships first-party tools through CX Coworker Gateway. It's a genuinely good product, and if all you need is to ask questions about your tenant, use it.

	Adobe AEP tools (CX Coworker Gateway)	@focusgts/aep-mcp-server
Operations	Read-only (search_*)	Full CRUD (read + write)
Tool count	8	61
Access	Invitation-only + org enablement	npm install — any org with API credentials
Batch ingestion	Not available	7 tools
Profiles / Identity	Not covered	6 tools
Privacy Service	Not covered	6 tools
Data Lifecycle	Not covered	9 tools
Transport	Adobe-hosted gateway	stdio (local, composes with other MCPs)
Data path	Queries traverse Adobe's gateway	Runs entirely in your own VPC
License	Proprietary	Apache 2.0
Error responses	—	Structured AEP_{status} codes

On Journey Optimizer and CJA: Adobe ships separate first-party MCP servers for both, so the rows above deliberately do not claim they are "not covered" — that would be false. What this server adds is a single credential spanning all three, and a write path on the AEP side that Adobe's gateway does not offer. The AJO and CJA tools here are read-only.

Audiences and destinations do appear, but in a separate Real-Time CDP tool set on the same gateway — and Adobe is explicit that creating, activating, updating, or deleting audiences, destinations, and dataflows isn't supported there either. The read-only boundary holds across the whole gateway.

They're complementary, not competing: pair Adobe's gateway for governed reads with this server for the write path.

Adobe's figures were read from their Experience Platform tools page (last updated 17 July 2026): search_datasets, search_class_relations, search_data_access, search_data_lake, search_dule, search_query_service, search_audit, search_allowed_ip_ranges. It's a Beta surface and will change — check their docs for the current figure. The read/write split is the durable difference, not the count.

---

🔌 Add it to your tool

claude mcp add aep \
  -e AEP_CLIENT_ID=... -e AEP_CLIENT_SECRET=... \
  -e AEP_ORG_ID=...@AdobeOrg -e AEP_SANDBOX_NAME=your-dev-sandbox \
  -- npx -y @focusgts/aep-mcp-server

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aep": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@focusgts/aep-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "AEP_CLIENT_ID": "...",
        "AEP_CLIENT_SECRET": "...",
        "AEP_ORG_ID": "...@AdobeOrg",
        "AEP_SANDBOX_NAME": "your-dev-sandbox"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aep": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@focusgts/aep-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "AEP_CLIENT_ID": "...",
        "AEP_CLIENT_SECRET": "...",
        "AEP_ORG_ID": "...@AdobeOrg",
        "AEP_SANDBOX_NAME": "your-dev-sandbox"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "servers": {
    "aep": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@focusgts/aep-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "AEP_CLIENT_ID": "...",
        "AEP_CLIENT_SECRET": "...",
        "AEP_ORG_ID": "...@AdobeOrg",
        "AEP_SANDBOX_NAME": "your-dev-sandbox"
      }
    }
  }
}

---

🔐 Credentials

Get them at developer.adobe.com/console: create a project → add Experience Platform API → OAuth Server-to-Server.

Variable	Required	Description
AEP_CLIENT_ID	Yes	Adobe I/O client ID
AEP_CLIENT_SECRET	Yes	Adobe I/O client secret
AEP_ORG_ID	Yes	IMS org ID — must end @AdobeOrg
AEP_SANDBOX_NAME	Yes	Sandbox to scope every call to. No default — see below
AEP_ALLOW_MUTATIONS	No	true to permit any write at all. Off by default
AEP_MODE	No	read-only · safe (default) · production
AEP_I_UNDERSTAND_THIS_WRITES_TO_PROD	No	Only if your sandbox is genuinely named prod
AEP_LOG_RESPONSE_BODIES	No	Log raw Adobe error bodies. Off by default — Adobe echoes request context, which can include identity values
LOG_LEVEL	No	Pino level (default info)
AEP_REQUEST_TIMEOUT_MS	No	Per-request timeout (default 30000)
AEP_MAX_RETRIES	No	Retries on 429/5xx (default 3)
CJA_GLOBAL_COMPANY_ID	No	CJA global company id. Omit it — CJA scopes by IMS org for this credential shape. Set it only to force an explicit x-proxy-global-company-id
CJA_BASE_URL	No	Override the CJA host (default https://cja.adobe.io)
CJA_REQUEST_TIMEOUT_MS	No	Per-request timeout for CJA (default 30000)
CJA_MAX_RETRIES	No	CJA retries on 429/5xx (default 3)
CJA_LIVE_TESTS	No	Set to 1 to enable the opt-in live CJA integration tests

AEP_SANDBOX_NAME has no default, deliberately. It used to fall back to prod, which meant a config file missing one line silently pointed every request — reads included — at production, with no warning. There is no safe default: a wrong guess is indistinguishable from a correct one until something is read or written in the wrong environment. Setting it explicitly to prod is allowed; that's a visible, deliberate choice, and mutations there are still refused by the write guard.

Sandbox scoping. Every tool sends x-sandbox-name, and Query Service derives its database as <AEP_SANDBOX_NAME>:all.

---

🧾 Entitlements

Not every Adobe org licenses every AEP product. A tool returning AEP_403 usually means a missing entitlement rather than a bad credential.

Category	Required entitlement
Schemas · Datasets · Ingestion	AEP (base)
Identities	AEP (base) + Identity Service
Profiles · Segments · Destinations	Real-Time CDP
Sources	AEP (base) — connector availability varies by SKU
Query Service	AEP Query Service add-on
Privacy Service	Adobe Privacy Service (sold separately)
Data Hygiene	AEP (base). Adobe documents no Data Distiller gate here — an earlier version of this table wrongly claimed one. A 401 means wrong org, wrong sandbox, or wrong credential profile, in that order

---

🏗️ Architecture

TypeScript strict end-to-end, @modelcontextprotocol/sdk + zod, stdio transport, stateless per request.

flowchart LR
  C["MCP client<br/>Claude · Cursor<br/>Copilot · ChatGPT"]
  T["aep-mcp-server<br/><b>61 tools</b><br/>14 categories"]
  G{{"write guard<br/>fail-closed"}}
  A1["Schema Registry<br/>· Catalog"]
  A2["Batch Ingestion"]
  A3["UPS · Segmentation<br/>· Destinations"]
  A4["Data Lifecycle<br/>· Privacy"]
  IMS[/"Adobe IMS<br/>OAuth S2S"/]

  C -- "stdio · JSON-RPC 2.0" --> T
  T -- "every call, no exceptions" --> G
  IMS -. "token cache · 401 re-auth" .-> T
  G -- "HTTPS · Bearer · x-sandbox-name" --> A1
  G --> A2
  G --> A3
  G --> A4

OAuth Server-to-Server with a deduped token cache, structured pino logging with PII redaction, exponential-backoff retries, automatic 401 re-auth, working cursor pagination, structured AEP_{status} error codes, and a graceful-shutdown lifecycle. All logs go to stderr — stdout is reserved for the MCP JSON-RPC stream.

---

🧪 Development

git clone https://github.com/Focus-GTS/aep-mcp-server.git
cd aep-mcp-server && npm install && npm run build && npm test

npm run dev          # tsx src/server.ts (hot-reload)
npm test             # vitest — 509 tests
npm run typecheck    # tsc --noEmit
npm run tools        # print the registered tool surface

npm run test:live runs a read-only smoke suite against a real IMS org and sandbox to verify credentials, entitlements, and sandbox scoping end to end. It invokes no destructive tool and requires AEP_SANDBOX_NAME to point at a non-production sandbox.

---

🧩 Part of the Focus GTS Adobe suite

eds-mcp-server	MCP server for Adobe Edge Delivery Services — read, audit, fix, publish and undo your site
eds-content-ops-skills	AI skills for EDS content ops — first third-party contributor merged into Adobe's official skills repo
eds-ops	CLI + GitHub Action for automated site grading and PR gating
EDS Score	Free browser-based site health analyzer

---

Built by Focus GTS — Adobe Silver Solution Partner · Apache-2.0 Bug reports and PRs welcome at Focus-GTS/aep-mcp-server · dfox@focusgts.com Not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe Inc. or Anthropic, PBC.