Mistral, a European AI company, told its enterprise customers that the connectors linking its product to Google Drive and Microsoft SharePoint will be shut down and deleted on August 31. Customers have to install replacements themselves, and every user has to reconnect their own account. There is no automatic migration.
Almost certainly, none of this touches your business directly. Mistral's Vibe Work is an enterprise product, and if you were using it you would have heard from them already. So why bring it up.
Because the plumbing described in that announcement is the same plumbing sitting behind a lot of the AI tools small businesses have started plugging into. When you click "connect Google Drive" inside a chatbot, a note-taking app or a customer service widget, one of two things happens. Either the tool asks Google for a file each time it needs one, or it builds and stores its own searchable copy of your documents on its own servers. Mistral did the second. It processed the folders an administrator chose and kept the index in its data centres.
That has two practical consequences. First, someone other than Google is holding a version of your files, which matters if those files include client contracts, staff records or anything you have promised to keep confidential. Second, when the vendor turns the feature off, the copy goes with it, and the connection breaks on a date they choose, not you.
The replacement approach, MCP, is a shared standard that lets AI tools call out to other services. The interesting detail in the reporting is that MCP does not tell you whether a copy is being stored or not. It depends entirely on who is running the connector. So "we use MCP" is not an answer to the question of where your documents live.
What to do. Make a short list of every AI or automation tool that has been granted access to your Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft account. In Google, that is under Security, then "Your connections to third-party apps". Revoke anything you no longer recognise or use. For the ones you keep, ask the vendor a plain question: do you store a copy of our files, and where. If they cannot answer it quickly, that is information too.
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