CB Insights MCP Manager Case Study

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Right-Sized AI Access:
How CB Insights Brought Claude to the Whole Company

“We didn’t let everyone use Claude until we brought MCP Manager on. It was a prerequisite.”

Mike Bogart
Manager of IT Operations at CB Insights

About CB Insights’ AI Transformation

CB Insights is an enterprise intelligence platform with about 400 employees, based in New York City. Mike Bogart’s IT Operations team decides which AI tools and connectors employees can use, and every request for a new one goes through them.

CB Insights bought Claude for the whole company in spring 2026. To make it useful, teams wanted Claude connected to the tools where their work already happens. RevOps and sales needed Salesforce. Other teams needed Confluence, Jira and Datadog. Google Workspace mattered for all employees, regardless of their team. CB Insights has built up more than 200 shared drives over the years, and connecting Claude to them would open up much of the company’s work.

The Challenge

As CB Insights prepared to roll out Claude company-wide, its Legal team first wanted to be sure AI agents couldn’t reach sensitive Google Drive folders. Some of those shared drives held HR records, benefits information, legal files and proprietary company data.

Legal’s concern was accidental exposure. Google Drive permissions couldn’t guarantee that sensitive data wouldn’t get pulled from an agent because employees with access to a folder pass that same access to their agents. For example, a legal team member who has access to folders with sensitive contracts would have an agent that also does. CB Insights set a high governance standard for itself to offer guardrails that prevented this.

The IT team looked for a tool that could keep agents out of specific folders, searching with Claude, ChatGPT and Google. That search led them to MCP Manager.

“We had a super hard time finding anything close to what you guys do.”

Mike Bogart

The Requirements

CB Insights needed a central layer to block Google Drive folders. This way, guardrails would apply to agents even when the user had access to the folder. The blocks also had to cover every subfolder inside a blocked folder.

CB Insights’ IT team decided to take the approach of starting from the tightest setting and granting exceptions as needed. This way, a small gap never has the chance to grow into a bigger one.

IT also needed to manage access at company scale. That meant one central place to approve every connector and folder exclusion, plus users and teams provisioned automatically from JumpCloud, the company’s IdP. For employees, getting connected had to come down to a single sign-in, with nothing to install or configure.

The Solution

CB Insights tried MCP Manager as the control layer between Claude and its MCP servers. MCP Manager hosts the Google Workspace MCP server for CB Insights, as Google’s own server is in Developer Preview (as of October 2026). MCP Manager’s gateway enforces its rules engine by blocking Drive folders via folder IDs.

During the trial, the engineering team confirmed that blocked folders stayed blocked while everything else kept working. In one test, Claude read a Google Doc linked in a Jira ticket and summarized it straight into the ticket’s description.

Before launch, Legal and IT reviewed the company’s shared drives, including ones that were no longer active, and listed every folder to exclude. IT converted the list to folder IDs and pasted them into MCP Manager. To verify the setup, the team asked Claude to pull data from a blocked folder, and MCP Manager denied the request in less than a minute.

“We asked Claude to go into that folder and get the data. It came back and said MCP Manager isn’t letting me do this, which is what we needed.”

MCP Manager connects to JumpCloud through SSO and SCIM. Users and teams sync from the groups IT already manages, and anyone removed from a group loses access automatically. With that in place, IT removed all direct connectors and sent one email with a knowledge base article. Employees add the connector in Claude and sign in once. CB Insights also uses MCP Manager to let Claude draft emails without sending them.

The Results

Every team at CB Insights now reaches its tools through MCP Manager, with multiple servers running through MCP gateways. Claude usage has grown every month since launch.

Governance has stayed simple. When someone needs a new folder blocked, IT adds its ID to the existing list. New MCP servers go through the same review, so nothing gets connected without IT. Admins can see everyone who has authenticated to each server, which makes troubleshooting a quick lookup. After the first month or two of setup, IT says it hasn’t heard a single concern.

“It’s like set and forget. No one can just add anything. It’s got to go through us. There’s a good safety wall here.”

Mike Bogart