AI help in a notes app is a different kind of decision from everything else in the product. Every other feature works on your data where it sits; this one sends part of your data somewhere else. That is why it ships switched off in Context. Four questions are worth answering first, and all four have answers you can see on screen.
What travels with the question
The common assumption is that the assistant “knows all your notes”. The approach that actually works is far narrower: notes relevant to your question are selected, and only those are read.
The difference is practical. In a workspace with fourteen thousand notes, “what did we decide in last month’s meeting” concerns a handful of them, not fourteen thousand. Treat that as the scope itself rather than as a privacy setting: the narrower the scope, the less leaves.
Whether the answer cites a note
If an assistant tells you “in February you settled on holding the price at $40”, there are two possibilities. It read that in one of your notes, or it produced a plausible sentence.
When the answer names the note it used, you can tell those apart in a second. When it doesn’t, verification falls to you, and a summary you have to verify takes longer than the text it summarised. Citation isn’t decoration on this feature. It is the one visible thing that decides whether the assistant saves you time.
What has been left outside the scope
Vault records sit outside the AI scope and are not read unless you open them. It is worth seeing that as a choice, because including them was technically available.
Use this to test whatever tool you are on: is the area you granted the assistant the same area where your passwords and keys live? If it is, then only the wording of a sentence separates “summarise this” from an instruction that walks a credential out the door.
Who the provider is
If you pick the provider, you are picking the contract. Three things are worth reading: whether submitted content is used for model training, how long records are retained, and in which country the data is processed.
The answers differ between providers and change over time. What the application can promise you ends at showing which provider your question goes to. The rest is written in that provider’s own terms, and it is worth ten minutes before the switch, not after.
Where it earns the switch
If those four answers satisfy you, what’s left is whether the benefit is real. An assistant is not needed to find a note that search already finds.
It earns its place on questions where the answer isn’t in any single note: tracing a decision scattered across three separate meetings, or noticing that what you wrote about one topic in March contradicts what you wrote in July. That is worth switching on for. “Summarise my notes” is not, and taking that trade underrates what you hand over in exchange.