What this does (in plain terms)

You have documents — contracts, reports, slide decks, scanned PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, images — and you want the assistant to reliably get the content out of them and make it usable: searchable, answerable, summarizable, or ready to feed a knowledge base or another tool.

Unstructured Transform does exactly that. Hand it files and it turns them into clean, structured, AI-ready data across 60+ formats with one pipeline — no custom parsing or OCR to build and maintain. See the Transform overview.

Under the hood it:

• Partitions each document into structured elements (titles, paragraphs, tables, lists), adjusting extraction per page for accuracy and cost.
• Enriches the result with metadata, table and image descriptions, and entity recognition.

The result is structured JSON that's ready for search, Q&A, summarization, and agents.

Why people use it

• Make documents searchable and answerable. Transform extracts clean, structured text and tables from your files so the assistant can search them and answer questions grounded in the source.
• Handle messy, varied files. One integration covers 60+ formats (scanned PDFs, tables, images, Office files) instead of a per-format parser.

When to use

USE THIS SKILL WHEN:

• The user wants to extract or structure content from documents (PDF, Office, images, emails, scanned files).
• The user wants documents made searchable or ready for RAG / Q&A / a knowledge base.
• The user asks to connect Unstructured or Unstructured Transform.
• A Transform tool returns an auth error → re-run the auth step below.

Prerequisites

• An Unstructured account to sign in with during the OAuth step (a free tier is available). See pricing.
• Nothing to install locally — Transform is a hosted MCP server.

Setup

Step 1 — Detect your environment

Determine which command tool to use for every command in this skill:

• If host_bash is available → you are on the desktop app. Use host_bash for all commands (the auth step opens your local browser).
• If it is unavailable → you are on the web app. Use bash for all commands (the platform handles the browser redirect).

Step 2 — Add the server

Add Transform as a remote streamable-http MCP server. Keep the default risk level (high) — Transform ingests file content, so per-call approval is the safe default.

assistant mcp add unstructured-transform -t streamable-http -u https://mcp.transform.unstructured.io

The server is registered under the id unstructured-transform — that's the name shown by assistant mcp list and used in the commands below, even though this skill is titled "Chat with Complex Documents".

Step 3 — Authenticate via OAuth

assistant mcp auth unstructured-transform

This opens Unstructured's authorization page. After sign-in, the assistant handles the callback and caches the tokens.

• On desktop → run via host_bash (opens your local browser).
• On web app → run via bash (the platform handles the redirect).

Step 4 — Verify

assistant mcp list

Confirm unstructured-transform shows ✓ Connected. If it shows ! Needs authentication, re-run Step 3. If its tools don't appear within ~10 seconds, run assistant mcp reload.

Using Transform

Once connected, ask the assistant in plain language, e.g. "Use Unstructured Transform to parse these files and return one JSON file per source file," or "Extract the tables from this PDF." Transform partitions each file and returns structured output; to tune partitioning and enrichment behavior, see Control Transform output.

Per-request limits (Transform enforces these; plan around them):

• Each file must be a supported file type.
• Each file must be 50 MB or less.
• Each request may include 10 files or fewer.
• At most 5 requests may run at a time.

Disconnecting

assistant mcp remove unstructured-transform

This removes the config entry and cleans up the stored OAuth credentials.

SKILL COMPLETE WHEN

• Connect: unstructured-transform appears in assistant mcp list as ✓ Connected and the user confirms its tools are available in the conversation.
• Disconnect: assistant mcp remove unstructured-transform succeeds and the server no longer appears in assistant mcp list.