Enterprise AI notetaker security checklist: Compliance questions for procurement

TL;DR: This checklist gives procurement and IT teams the vendor questions to ask before approving an AI notetaker, along with Granola's answers to each. Three questions tend to determine how fast a tool clears security review: how long does the vendor retain audio after transcription, does participant data train public AI models by default, and does the tool support SSO and admin controls for centralized access management? For compliance obligations specific to your organization, consult your legal team and the authoritative regulatory sources linked throughout this article.

Product teams regularly adopt AI tools before security review catches up. A useful notetaking tool spreads across research and design through word of mouth, embedding itself in workflows before anyone has evaluated the vendor. It's a pattern IT and procurement teams recognize immediately.

This is the Shadow AI pattern playing out. When product teams adopt tools without a security review, IT sees unvetted data flows and unknown compliance risk. The research you've already done sits in limbo while Legal negotiates vendor contracts.

This checklist gives you and your IT stakeholders the exact compliance questions to ask AI notetaker vendors. From SOC 2 verification to data retention rules and participant consent protocols, these questions separate vendors that pass enterprise security review from those that stall in procurement.

AI notetaker security: mitigating unique risks

Customer interviews often contain sensitive information: unannounced product plans, participant frustrations with competitors, pricing expectations, and candid opinions about your company. When those conversations route through an unapproved AI tool, you create real exposure. Transcripts may end up on third-party servers with no organizational oversight, potentially used to train AI models without participant knowledge. Privacy frameworks like GDPR and CCPA set baseline obligations for how this data must be handled, but the practical question for procurement teams is simpler: does this vendor meet the bar?

Data exposure risks for AI notetakers

Shadow AI in the context of meeting tools can occur when someone uses a personal account on an unapproved transcription tool to capture a customer interview. That transcript may end up on a third-party server, potentially used to train public AI models, with no organizational oversight of who can access it. A common procurement objective is replacing unsanctioned tools with a managed, approved solution that gives IT visibility into data flows from the start.

How AI notetakers process sensitive data

Meeting transcripts routinely contain personal data: speaker names, calendar metadata, figures discussed verbally, and contract details. Ask vendors: what data types do you collect, how is each stored, and what gets deleted automatically once a meeting ends? Some vendors build persistent profiles linking individuals to topics across conversations over time. Ask about this directly.

Safeguarding your AI notetaker data

Data lifecycle management is where most procurement reviews stall. The questions below give you concrete answers to bring to legal before signing.

Where is AI notetaker data stored?

Verify where the vendor stores your data: EU, US, or both? Is your organization's data logically isolated from other customers? For GDPR compliance, organizations typically need either EU data residency or valid Standard Contractual Clauses documented in the Data Processing Agreement. Get these answers in writing before signing.

AI notetaker data retention rules

Ask vendors: what is your default retention schedule, and can you configure org-wide auto-deletion periods? The storage limitation principle requires personal data be kept only as long as necessary. Check whether the vendor supports configurable deletion policies that match your own data governance requirements.

Third-party AI model training opt-out

Ask vendors whether your meeting content is used to train public AI models, and whether you're opted in or out by default.

Ask whether the vendor opts you in or out by default. With Granola, you can opt out of AI model training. On the Enterprise plan, the org-wide opt-out is enabled by default, so you don't need to rely on individual users to configure it.

How audio and transcripts are protected

Ask vendors: Do you store raw audio files, or delete them immediately after transcription?

Granola captures device audio, transcribes in real time, and deletes the audio automatically once transcription completes. Only text transcripts are retained. There are no audio files to breach, subpoena, or subject to a data deletion request. That architecture expedites security review because it generates less sensitive data by default.

One trade-off is worth being explicit about: without stored audio, post-meeting audio playback is not available. If your organization requires audio verification for legal discovery or compliance, this trade-off affects whether Granola fits your requirements.

Ensuring PII protection in AI notetakers

Ask vendors: Do you apply data masking before sending transcripts to AI models, and can transcripts be searched and deleted by data subject name or email?

Vendors that retain only text transcripts collect less PII by default than those storing full audio and video. The principle of data minimization applies to both what a vendor collects and what you allow it to store. Granola deletes audio automatically once transcription completes, and stores only encrypted text.

Verifying AI notetaker compliance proofs

Documentation separates vendors that have completed compliance work from those still in progress. Ask for these documents early in your evaluation, before procurement decisions are made.

SOC 2 Type II report for vendors

A SOC 2 Type II report confirms that a vendor's security controls operated effectively over a defined audit period, not just that they were designed correctly. For the full breakdown of Trust Services Criteria, see Drata's SOC 2 Type II guide.

Ask vendors: Can you share your SOC 2 Type II report under NDA, and when does your current audit period close?

Request the full report under NDA. Check the issue date. If it's older than 12 months, ask when the next audit period closes. Granola is SOC 2 Type II certified. Because the architecture deletes audio immediately, the audit scope is reduced.

Evaluating GDPR vendor documents

Ask vendors for their Data Processing Agreement before signing. If they can't produce one, treat that as a red flag. Granola's DPA is available on request. For a full breakdown of what a compliant DPA should contain, see gdpr-info.eu.

HIPAA eligibility and BAA availability

Ask vendors: Are you HIPAA compliant, and can you provide a Business Associate Agreement?

Certifications for enterprise AI security

ISO 27001 certification indicates a vendor has a formal, risk-based Information Security Management System audited by an accredited registrar. It is particularly relevant for European procurement teams. For a detailed comparison of SOC 2 and ISO 27001, Drata's compliance resources cover the differences clearly.

Ask vendors: Do you hold ISO 27001 certification, and is it current?

Granola currently holds SOC 2 Type II certification.

Vendor's local regulatory adherence

Some US states require all-party consent before transcribing a conversation. Check the Digital Media Law Project for the full state-by-state breakdown. For interstate or international calls, ask vendors whether their consent notification features can be configured before a meeting begins.

Controlling access to sensitive research data

Once data is in the system, access control determines who can see it and under what conditions. These questions matter most when customer interview folders contain verbatim participant feedback and confidential roadmap decisions.

SSO and SAML 2.0 support

Single Sign-On is important for enterprise deployment. SSO centralizes authentication through your existing identity provider. When an employee leaves, deactivating their identity provider account removes access to connected tools. Granola's Enterprise plan supports SSO. Ask vendors which identity providers they support, what authentication protocols they use, and what user lifecycle management features are available.

MFA compliance for AI notetakers

When SSO is configured, your identity provider enforces MFA. Confirm that the vendor also supports MFA enforcement independently for users who authenticate directly rather than via SSO. For teams in regulated industries, verify that MFA cannot be bypassed by switching authentication methods.

Managing AI notetaker permissions

Role-based access controls, when available, can let you define who can access which folders, who can export transcripts, and who can configure org-wide settings. For research teams, this could mean sharing customer interview folders with specific engineering and design stakeholders without giving them access to confidential recruiting or board meeting notes. Ask vendors for a full permissions matrix covering Admin, Manager, and User roles before committing to an org-wide deployment.

API authentication options for AI notetakers

If your team plans to sync meeting data into a CRM, research repository, or analytics tool, ask what authentication standards the vendor supports. OAuth 2.0 and API key management with scoped permissions are the expected standards. API access is available on Business and Enterprise plans, with additional admin-level API capabilities offered exclusively on Enterprise.

Audit trails for compliance verification

Audit logs are the evidence layer that turns security policies into verifiable facts. Without them, you cannot prove who accessed what data or demonstrate compliance during an investigation.

Track all user actions for compliance

Look for audit trails that log security-relevant actions: user logins, access to meeting transcripts, export and download events, admin configuration changes, and transcription start and stop. Immutable logs, designed to be tamper-proof, are more reliable as forensic evidence.

Auditing AI notetaker data access

Access logs support multiple compliance scenarios, including data subject access requests. For meeting transcripts containing participant data, detailed access logs showing which users accessed specific transcripts help demonstrate proper data handling practices. Ask vendors whether logs capture access at the individual transcript level and whether that data is exportable on demand.

Securing audit log retention

Ask how long the vendor retains audit logs and whether that period is configurable. A 90-day window is insufficient for annual compliance audits. Many enterprise security teams prefer at least 12 months of log retention with the option to extend.

Integrating AI notetaker logs with SIEM

Security Information and Event Management platforms like Splunk or Datadog typically aggregate logs from tools in your environment for centralized monitoring. Ask whether the vendor can export logs in a structured format (such as JSON, CEF, or Syslog) compatible with your SIEM. This requirement often distinguishes vendors who have invested in enterprise-grade logging from those who have not.

Admin log visibility and review

Ask vendors: do admins have a native dashboard to review user activity, or does monitoring require SIEM integration?

AI notetaker data encryption standards

Every vendor should meet these baseline requirements. The questions that matter are in the details.

Encryption in transit (TLS standards)

TLS 1.2 or higher is the current benchmark for data in transit, with TLS 1.3 preferred for new implementations. Ask vendors: which TLS versions do you support, and do you enforce cipher suite restrictions to prevent downgrade attacks?

Encrypting AI notetaker storage

AES-256 is the standard benchmark for data at rest. Ask vendors to confirm the encryption standard applied to stored transcripts, metadata, and derived data such as summaries or action items.

Managing AI notetaker encryption keys

Ask whether the vendor manages encryption keys on your behalf (common in SaaS) or whether customer-managed keys may be available. For organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements, customer-managed keys provide an additional layer of control. Ask about key rotation practices and whether rotation is automated.

Evaluate notetaker E2EE security model

End-to-end encryption in meeting tools is technically constrained: the AI layer must process plaintext to generate summaries, which limits what can remain fully encrypted. Ask vendors to explain exactly what is encrypted at each stage of the data flow and what their AI processing layer can access. A clear, specific answer matters more than a marketing claim.

Vetting your AI notetaker partner

The vendor's own security posture is as important as the features they offer. A tool with strong privacy architecture but weak internal security practices remains a risk.

Pen test frequency for data security

Third-party penetration testing is a baseline practice for mature SaaS vendors. Ask for a summary of the most recent test: the scope, the date, the firm that conducted it, and the findings that were remediated. A vendor that cannot share any results, or whose most recent test appears outdated, may be a risk that enterprise security teams will flag during review.

Ethical bug reporting for AI

A published vulnerability disclosure policy and a bug bounty program typically indicate a vendor actively invites external security researchers to report weaknesses rather than waiting for issues to surface in production.

Vendor data breach response plan

Ask vendors: what are your breach notification commitments, and are they specified in your DPA? GDPR Article 33 sets the standard most enterprise procurement teams reference.

Vendor requirements for participant consent

Consent is where participant experience and legal requirements meet. Getting this wrong creates both legal risk and trust damage with the people you depend on for research.

Consent protocol for AI notetakers

Bot-based AI notetakers typically join meetings as a visible participant, which provides automatic technical disclosure but may affect the interview environment. This creates a trade-off between automated transparency and research dynamics that varies by participant and context.

Granola captures device audio without joining as a visible participant. No bot appears in the participant list, and no automated announcement from Granola plays. This removes the automatic technical disclosure a bot would provide, placing the responsibility for participant notification entirely with you, which means you introduce transcription as part of your research protocol rather than having it announced by the tool.

"It listens directly from my device audio no bots joining calls and produces clean, structured summaries... far more seamless than tools like Otter.ai or Fireflies, which often feel intrusive because they require a bot to join the meeting." - Brahmatheja Reddy M. on G2

Required participant disclosures

Consider documenting your disclosure practice in your research consent process. As a recommended practice, participants should know that the meeting will be transcribed, how you plan to use the transcript, who will have access to it, and how they can request deletion of their data. Consider building this into your discussion guide template for consistency across sessions.

Fulfilling DSAR obligations

When a participant requests access to their data, your admin needs to locate and export everything held about them quickly. For the full scope of what data subject access requests require, see GDPR Article 15.

Fulfilling participant deletion rights

When a participant requests deletion, you need confidence that all transcripts, summaries, and derived data containing their information have been removed. The questions below cover DSAR response and deletion rights together, since both depend on the same admin capabilities.

Governing AI notetaker use across teams

Deployment without governance creates the Shadow AI problem inside your own approved toolset. Policy controls let IT enforce consistent behavior across the entire organization.

Setting AI notetaker domain policies

Enterprise admin controls should allow you to restrict tool access to verified company email domains. This can help prevent employees from creating personal accounts that sit outside your data governance framework. Ask vendors whether domain restriction is available on Enterprise plans and whether it can be enforced retroactively for existing accounts.

Secure AI notetaker data with DLP

Ask vendors whether they integrate with your existing DLP tooling, whether transcript exports can be restricted to approved destinations, and whether sharing via external link can be disabled at the admin level.

Controlling AI notetaker data export

Transcript exports to CRMs, Notion, Slack, or via Zapier are productivity features that can potentially become data leakage vectors. Ask for a full list of integration destinations and whether each can be enabled or disabled at the admin level on your Enterprise plan.

Tenant data isolation compliance

Your organization's transcripts should be logically separated from other customers' data on the vendor's infrastructure. Ask vendors to confirm their tenant isolation architecture and how multi-tenancy controls are addressed in their security documentation.

Secure AI notetaker data transfers

When transcripts sync to a CRM like HubSpot or Attio, ask whether the transfer uses encrypted connections and whether the receiving system's access controls meet your security requirements. A transcript that processes securely through your notetaker but lands in a poorly configured CRM has still been exposed.

Best practices for AI notetaker vendor evaluation

Expediting AI notetaker security review

Choosing a tool with data minimization built into its architecture may help streamline procurement. Security reviews stall when legal teams must negotiate deletion schedules for audio files that were never necessary to collect. Granola's architecture removes this negotiation entirely: device audio is transcribed in real time and deleted automatically once transcription completes. With this data minimization approach, Granola achieved SOC 2 Type II certification.

AI vendor compliance documentation

Request this standard packet from every vendor before progressing to contract negotiations:

1. SOC 2 Type II report (under NDA, issued within the last 12 months)
2. Data Processing Agreement (GDPR-compliant, including sub-processor list)
3. Penetration test summary (third-party, recent)
4. Privacy Policy and Terms of Service (current versions)
5. ISO 27001 certificate (if operating in European markets)
6. Incident response plan summary (with breach notification timelines)

Vendor hesitation to share these documents under NDA could signal either that the documents don't exist or that the contents won't hold up to scrutiny.

Custom DPA/MSA for AI compliance

Enterprise plans may allow negotiation of custom Data Processing Agreements and Master Subscription Agreements. Use this to specify data residency requirements, custom deletion timelines, breach notification windows, and sub-processor approval rights. Contact Granola Enterprise sales to request a custom DPA or discuss MSA terms.

Identifying AI notetaker threats

Vendor evaluation is not a one-time event. Revisit security posture at annual renewals: check SOC 2 report recency, penetration test dates, and sub-processor list changes that could affect data transfer agreements.

Ask vendors: How often is your SOC 2 report refreshed, and how do you notify customers when your sub-processor list changes?

Ready to streamline your next security review?

If you're ready to test a tool that handles the architecture questions before they become procurement blockers, try Granola and have your research team run their next session with Granola. Audio is deleted the moment transcription completes, the data footprint stays minimal, and setup takes under five minutes.

FAQs

What is Shadow AI and why does it matter for AI notetakers?

Shadow AI is the use of AI tools without IT or security team approval. For meeting tools specifically, it means confidential customer interviews or internal discussions may flow to cloud services with unknown data retention practices and no organizational oversight. An approved, audited notetaker with a signed DPA closes that gap.

What compliance certifications should an enterprise AI notetaker have?

Ask for a current SOC 2 Type II report issued within the last 12 months and a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreement. For organizations operating in European markets, ISO 27001 certification adds assurance that a formal information security management system is in place. See Drata's SOC 2 Type II guide for what to look for in a report.

Is Granola SOC 2 Type II certified?

Yes, Granola is SOC 2 Type II certified. The certification completed in three months rather than the typical 12 to 18 because the architecture deletes audio immediately after transcription, reducing the volume of sensitive data and the number of controls requiring audit.

Does Granola store audio recordings?

No. Granola captures device audio, transcribes in real time, and deletes the audio automatically once transcription completes. Only encrypted text transcripts are retained.

Is Granola HIPAA compliant?

No. Granola is not currently HIPAA compliant. Teams using AI notetakers in healthcare contexts where Protected Health Information may be discussed should verify HIPAA status and BAA availability with any vendor before deployment.

What is the safest approach to participant consent for AI notetakers?

Regardless of jurisdiction, inform all participants before the meeting begins that the session will be transcribed, explain how the transcript will be used, and confirm they are comfortable proceeding. The Digital Media Law Project provides state-by-state guidance on consent requirements. Consult your legal team for guidance on your specific participant jurisdictions.

What's the difference between SOC 2 Type I and Type II?

Type I confirms security controls were designed correctly at a single point in time. Type II confirms those controls operated effectively over a sustained period. Ask vendors: do you hold a Type II report, and can you share it on request? Granola achieved SOC 2 Type II certification. For a full breakdown of what each report covers, Drata's SOC 2 guide covers the distinction in detail.

Does Granola support Single Sign-On for enterprise deployment?

Yes, Granola's Enterprise plan supports SSO. This enables centralized user provisioning through your existing identity provider and allows IT to revoke access immediately when an employee leaves.

Key terms glossary

Shadow AI: The use of AI tools without IT or security team approval, creating organizational blind spots around sensitive data flows and compliance obligations.

SOC 2 Type II: An audit report validating that a vendor's security controls operated effectively over a defined audit period.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): EU regulation governing the collection, storage, and processing of personal data, with penalties up to €20M or 4% of annual global revenue for non-compliance.

DPA (Data Processing Agreement): A legal contract specifying how a vendor handles personal data on your behalf, including storage location, deletion procedures, and breach notification commitments.

DSAR (Data Subject Access Request): A formal request by an individual to access personal data a controller holds about them, with responses required within one month under GDPR Article 15.

BAA (Business Associate Agreement): A HIPAA-required contract between a covered entity and a vendor that may handle Protected Health Information, defining each party's data protection obligations.