Because a bot from a company nobody vetted is joining the call and taking the meeting somewhere else. From an IT department's point of view, an outside notetaker is an unapproved third party with access to internal conversations, sitting in the participant list of a meeting that might contain contracts, salaries or unreleased work.
So they block them. And when they do, a bot-based notetaker produces nothing at all, which you usually discover after the call.
Three things, roughly.
Data going somewhere unapproved. A company that has done the work to sign agreements with its own software vendors has done none of that with the notetaker your client happens to use. The meeting content leaves through a door nobody checked.
Consent exposure. If a bot records a call and someone later says they never agreed to it, the company is in the argument whether or not it was their tool.
It is simply visible. A bot in the participant list is easy to notice and easy to have an opinion about. Compliance teams noticed.
If you use a bot-based notetaker for client work, some percentage of your calls will not be recorded, and you will not choose which ones. The bot tries to join, it is refused, and the meeting proceeds without it. Some tools tell you, some do not tell you clearly, and either way the record does not exist.
For internal calls this is a nuisance. For a client call where something important was agreed, it is the exact call you most needed.
A botless recorder does not ask the meeting platform for anything. It records the display in front of you and the audio your computer is playing, the way a screen recorder does. There is nothing to admit and nothing to block.
Worth being clear about what this does and does not mean. It does not mean you should record calls people would object to. It means the mechanism does not depend on a third party being allowed into a meeting they were never invited to.
If the other side's policy is that the call must not be recorded at all, that is a policy about recording, not about bots, and it applies to you either way. Ask.
Because the bot belongs to a company they have no agreement with, and it takes meeting content outside the organization. It is an unvetted third party in a call that may contain sensitive material.
It cannot join, so nothing is recorded. Depending on the tool you may or may not get a clear warning, and you often find out only after the meeting.
It gets around a bot being blocked, not a policy against recording. If the other side does not want the call recorded, that applies regardless of how you would record it. Ask them.
They appear to be. Reviewers and users have reported more organizations blocking outside notetakers, and the visibility of the bot in the participant list is part of why it draws attention.
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