Somebody's AI notetaker sat in on that meeting. Whose record is it?

Halfway through a client call, a new participant appears: "Sarah's Notetaker has joined the meeting." Nobody invited it. Sarah barely remembers installing it. And from that moment, every candid thing said on the call is being turned into a permanent, searchable transcript held by a company none of you have heard of.

Some tools do not even announce themselves. They run on one participant's laptop or phone, capture the audio locally, and the rest of the meeting never knows a record was made at all.

This is not an argument for banning the things. Good minutes are valuable, most firms are bad at them, and a tool that fixes that is worth having. The problem is that the record now gets made by whoever brought the software, on terms nobody else in the room agreed to, and it lands somewhere your business cannot see.

The lawsuit that says the quiet part

On 30 July 2026 a proposed class action was filed in California against Granola, one of the better-known AI notetakers. The complaint alleges that the tool captured meeting audio without the knowledge of most participants and used the transcripts to train its AI models by default, and it quotes the company's own marketing: other people on the call "won't know it's there."

Granola will have its day in court, and the allegations are just that. But the suit joins similar cases against Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai, and together they name the design honestly: these products work by recording people who did not agree to be recorded. Invisibility was a feature.

That is American litigation under American wiretap law. The design question crosses the Atlantic intact.

Four questions, one meeting policy

Before the next external call, it is worth knowing the answers to these:

Who consented? Not "who saw the bot join": who agreed. A client who spots the notetaker three minutes in and says nothing has not consented to anything, and the goodwill cost of making them ask is real.

Where does the transcript live? In your tenant, or in a vendor's cloud under an account belonging to one employee? If that employee leaves, the record of two years of client meetings goes with their login. This is the personal-WhatsApp problem again, wearing a headset.

Whose account is it? Free tiers are free for a reason. If a staff member's personal free-tier tool is capturing client conversations, the honest description is that your client meetings may be someone else's training data.

What did the NDA assume? Most confidentiality clauses were written when the leak risk was a person. A transcript on a third party's servers is a different shape of risk, and the client's lawyers may notice before yours do.

The fix for the awkward mid-call version of this conversation costs one line in your meeting invitations: whether recording or AI transcription is welcome, and whose tool does it. Said up front, it is housekeeping. Discovered mid-call, it is an incident.

The Teams settings that decide it

If your firm runs Microsoft 365, most of this is already controllable; it is just that nobody has looked. The controls live in the Teams admin centre under Meetings, in the meeting policies:

1. 01Decide who may record and transcribe at all: transcription is a per-organiser and per-user policy, so it can be on for the people who run client meetings and off elsewhere
2. 02Turn on 'Require participant agreement for recording and transcription', so every attendee is asked before a recording starts rather than told afterwards
3. 03Tighten the lobby: a third-party notetaker bot joins like any other guest, so lobby and guest-join settings that vet people vet bots too
4. 04Write the one-line meeting policy into your invitation template, so the conversation happens before the call, not during it

With Teams Premium, organisers also get a per-meeting option for exactly who can record and transcribe. For a sensitive meeting, that is the difference between a setting and a hope.

None of this stops a participant running a recorder on their own phone. Nothing technical does. What it does is make your firm's own record-making deliberate, and give you clean standing to ask everyone else to extend the same courtesy.

Where a human minute still wins

Minute-taking is part of our retained PA work, so we should say plainly what a transcript is and is not.

A transcript is total recall. It settles "who said what" arguments and it is better than the nothing most firms currently produce. What it does not do is decide. Forty-five minutes of conversation becomes eleven pages in which the one commitment that mattered sits in the middle of paragraph sixty, phrased as "yeah, we could probably do that".

A good minute is four lines long: what was decided, who is doing it, by when, and what was deliberately left open. That is an act of judgement, not capture, and the AI summaries that attempt it still confuse discussion with decision often enough that someone has to check. If a human is checking anyway, the human writing four lines was the cheaper tool all along.

So the honest position is both: capture is now cheap and sometimes worth having, with consent and a known home for the file; judgement is still hired. Where the line falls depends on how your meetings actually run, and that conversation is a shorter one than you might think.

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We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.