Most public affairs software asks the same thing of you. You have a conversation that matters — a quiet word in a corridor, a stakeholder shifting their position — and then you’re expected to sit down and re-enter it as a series of forms. A fair amount gets lost in that gap between the meeting and the documentation. It’s been the cost of doing transparent public affairs for a while now, and nobody much liked it.

Lobster is piloting a native MCP layer, built with Mearra, covering our whole data model. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open-standard “plug” that lets your AI assistant connect directly to a tool like Lobster and work inside it — reading and updating its data — instead of you copying things back and forth by hand.

What this means in practice is that you talk to the AI assistant you already use, and it handles the record-keeping: stakeholder profiles, organisation memberships, action logs, the briefing before a meeting and the follow-up after it.

Because lobbying in Finland is a regulated domain, we were careful about how it works.

• Every AI connection runs on your personal API key and acts as you, with the same audit trail and provenance as if you’d entered the data by hand. No anonymous service account editing the authoritative record on the quiet.
• Canonical entries imported from official registers are locked. The AI can’t rewrite them, however politely you ask.
• Destructive actions are blocked where dependencies exist, and you’re told why.
• It’s AI-agnostic. Bring Claude, Copilot, or whatever your organisation has approved — we’ve no interest in tying you to a proprietary assistant you’ll want shot of in a year or two.

So what does AI actually change? Not the most interesting part. Reading a room, knowing whose call to take, sensing what’s better left unsaid — that was never work a machine could do for you, and it still isn’t. Stakeholder relationships and strategy stay where they belong, with you. What changes is that the routine entries stop eating into the rest of your working hours, with Lobster’s MCP taking on a large share of them.

If you’d like to see how Lobster’s MCP works, get in touch. We’d love to show you!