Before you connect your assistant to your meetings

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the tools and data they need. Anthropic introduced it and on December 9, 2025 announced it was donating the protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, so that it would be governed neutrally. For a facilitator the practical meaning is simple: a meeting tool can publish one connection, and many assistants can use it.

In Circleback's case, its support documentation lists finding meetings by keyword, date, tag, attendee or domain, retrieving transcripts with speaker labels and timestamps, searching and creating action items, looking up people and companies, and editing or sharing meetings. It names Claude, ChatGPT, Raycast, Claude Code, Cursor and Codex as supported clients. That is a lot of reach for a connection you can set up in minutes, and the write tools mean an assistant can change records, not only read them.

Ask for the narrowest permission that does the job. The documentation says you can request a read-only scope, in which case the tools that make changes return an error. For research and preparation, read-only is enough. Then decide what the connection may reach. A transcript of a workshop about a product launch is one thing. A transcript of a disciplinary conversation is another. If your tool lets you exclude meetings by tag or team, use it.

Everyone who spoke in those meetings, and they were told one thing: that a notetaker would capture the session. They were not told that an assistant might later be asked to find every time they raised a concern. The question to answer first is whether your original notice covers that use, which is the problem behind the bots nobody asked for. If it does not, update the notice. If you cannot say what the notice covers, you have found the real project.

Three sentences. The assistant may read meeting records for preparation and summary. It may not be asked to profile or evaluate any named person. Write access is switched on only for a specific task and switched off afterwards. Put those where your team can see them. The best policy for a new tool is short enough that people remember it, and writing the AI rule first is how I get there.

For a facilitator who runs many sessions, yes. Asking an assistant to find the three objections that keep returning across a quarter of sessions saves an afternoon, and the answer tends to improve the next design. The cost is a standing permission, so treat the connection like a key: know who holds a copy and revisit it on a schedule.