PreShiftIQ Assistant-Tool Surface: Terms of Use
1. What this surface is
PreShiftIQ operates a tool server at mcp.preshiftiq.com (the "Assistant Surface") that AI assistants and other software agents can connect to using the Model Context Protocol. It offers two kinds of tools.
Public tools work without signing in. Through them an assistant can describe the PreShiftIQ platform, list the technology categories PreShiftIQ covers, read the public catalog roster for a category, read how PreShiftIQ matching works and how PreShiftIQ is paid, and produce a link for a buyer to start a free assessment at app.preshiftiq.com. Public tools return the facts preshiftiq.com publishes, in a machine-readable form, and nothing else.
Signed-in tools let a person with a PreShiftIQ account read their own records through their assistant after signing in. A buyer can read the status of their latest assessment and their notified matches. A vendor can read their scorecard status and lead counts and, for a lead they accepted, the buyer contact details already released to them. Signed-in tools read results the PreShiftIQ platform has already produced. They produce no new match, score, or judgment.
Signed-in tools are available only through the assistant products PreShiftIQ has admitted, which the Privacy Policy, Section 5B, lists: assistants an individual connects to their own account, and assistant platforms an organization connects through an Organisation Connection (Section 5). Any other assistant can use the public tools only.
2. Who these terms apply to
These terms apply to any person or organization that connects an assistant, agent, application, or script to the Assistant Surface, and to any person who relies on output an assistant produces from it. Connecting to the Assistant Surface, directing an assistant to use it, or configuring an Organisation Connection is acceptance of these terms. An administrator who configures an Organisation Connection accepts these terms for the organization and confirms they have authority to do so.
Your use of an assistant is also governed by that assistant provider's terms, or, for an Organisation Connection, by your organization's agreement with its assistant platform's provider. Those terms govern the provider's handling of your conversation and of the results it receives; these terms govern the Assistant Surface. PreShiftIQ is not a party to the provider's terms. The Privacy Policy, and for vendors the PreShiftIQ vendor terms, continue to apply to your PreShiftIQ account.
3. What the public data is, and is not
Catalog coverage is factual. Inclusion of a vendor in a PreShiftIQ category roster means the vendor sells into that category. It is sourced from public information and interviews, it is not removable on request, and it is never an endorsement, a ranking, a recommendation, or a statement that the vendor participates commercially with PreShiftIQ. Corrections to a vendor's name, ownership, or product line are always accepted at info@preshiftiq.com.
Public identifiers are permanent. Each covered vendor carries a PreShiftIQ public identifier (form PSQ-V-000000). An identifier is issued once, is never reused, and continues to resolve at api.preshiftiq.com/api/public/id/ after any later change to the underlying record, including a merge of two records into one, in which case the older identifier resolves to the surviving one. A retired identifier resolves with the reason it was retired. Identifiers exist so that a citation made today remains resolvable later; they carry no meaning beyond identity.
Counts and rosters are live. The number of covered vendors in a category and the roster itself are read from PreShiftIQ's catalog at the time of the request and change as the catalog changes. A figure quoted by an assistant reflects the moment it was read.
No public tool produces a match. Public tools produce no fit assessment, no shortlist, and no comparison between vendors. A buyer who wants a match completes the free assessment on the PreShiftIQ platform, where matching is payment-blind by architecture: what a vendor pays never enters the scoring path, and every scoring decision is written to an immutable, time-stamped record. A signed-in tool shows a buyer the matches that assessment produced, as the platform shows them, and nothing more.
4. Signed-in tools
To use a signed-in tool you sign in to PreShiftIQ on the sign-in pages at clerk.preshiftiq.com, and your assistant receives a short-lived access token that it presents with each signed-in request. PreShiftIQ checks the token on every request that carries it and does not store it.
A signed-in tool returns only your own records, under the same release rules as the platform: a vendor's contact details reach a buyer, and a buyer's contact details reach a vendor, only after the vendor has accepted the match (Privacy Policy, Section 5). What a signed-in tool returns is delivered to your assistant, and from then on it is held by your assistant's provider.
Connect an assistant only to your own account. You are responsible for the assistant you connect and for anything it does with your account's results.
Accounts in a PreShiftIQ demonstration environment receive no answers from signed-in tools through any assistant. Demonstration data shown through an assistant could be mistaken for a real match, or for a vendor's real intention to make contact. To see how the platform works, ask for a demonstration at info@preshiftiq.com.
5. Organisation Connections
For assistant platforms an organization runs for its own people (today, Gemini Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot Studio), PreShiftIQ sets up an Organisation Connection on request: one connection per organization and product, with its own client identifier and secret. PreShiftIQ charges nothing for an Organisation Connection. PreShiftIQ delivers the secret once, encrypted, to the organization's administrator, and reads the passphrase to them by telephone.
A connection may request buyer tools, and for a vendor organization vendor tools. Advisor tools are never available through an Organisation Connection. Each person in the organization signs in with their own PreShiftIQ account and sees only their own records.
The organization: keeps the secret confidential and uses it only for that connection; enables every security setting PreShiftIQ's connection guide requires (including PKCE, where the product offers it as an option); tells PreShiftIQ at info@preshiftiq.com at once if the secret may have been exposed, and when it wants the connection rotated or removed; and does not let people share a PreShiftIQ account through the connection.
PreShiftIQ may replace the secret, or remove the connection, at any time, including when the organization's trial or contract for its assistant platform ends. Removing a connection ends the assistant's ability to obtain new access for it. PreShiftIQ records each step it takes on a connection, as the Privacy Policy, Section 5B, describes; those records never contain the secret.
6. Assistant output is the assistant's
PreShiftIQ supplies data to assistants. It does not control, review, or warrant what an assistant says with that data. An assistant may summarize, paraphrase, omit, combine with other sources, or misstate. Any recommendation, ranking, comparison, or judgment about a vendor that appears in an assistant's output was made by the assistant, not by PreShiftIQ, and is not attributable to PreShiftIQ. Each result the Assistant Surface returns carries PreShiftIQ's boundary statement for this reason.
If an assistant's output about PreShiftIQ or a covered vendor is wrong, the authoritative source is preshiftiq.com and the resolver at api.preshiftiq.com. PreShiftIQ welcomes reports of misstatements at info@preshiftiq.com so the underlying data or its presentation can be improved where PreShiftIQ controls it.
7. Permitted use and acceptable use
You may connect to the Assistant Surface to obtain the information it publishes, to read your own records through signed-in tools, and to help a buyer start an assessment. You may cite PreShiftIQ data, with attribution to PreShiftIQ and, where a vendor is named, with its public identifier, so the citation stays resolvable.
You may not: use the Assistant Surface to build, train, or refresh a competing directory, ranking, or vendor database; harvest the catalog systematically beyond the rate limits the surface enforces; probe, load-test, or circumvent its protections, its sign-in, or its admission of assistant products; present an access token or connection secret that was not issued to you; read or attempt to read another person's records; impersonate PreShiftIQ; or present PreShiftIQ data as an endorsement, ranking, or participation statement.
8. Rate limits and protocol requirements
Automated access is limited by the rate limits, concurrency limits, and protocol requirements the surface enforces and states in its responses. Limits apply per requesting network address and, for signed-in requests, per account. A request over a limit, or one that does not meet the protocol's requirements, is refused with a stated error. No caller is exempt.
9. What PreShiftIQ records
Every request that reaches the Assistant Surface is recorded as an append-only fact: what was requested, the outcome, timing, the assistant's product family and self-declared name, the outcome of any sign-in check, and keyed hashes of the caller's network address and user agent. Tool arguments are recorded as a hash, never as their content. A signed-in tool call is recorded against the account it was made for. The Assistant Surface sets no cookies. A buyer who follows an assessment link from an assistant arrives at app.preshiftiq.com with a source marker (psq_src) naming the assistant's family; the Platform keeps it only after the buyer accepts cookies, under the first-party attribution storage described in the Cookie Policy, Section 2.5. Details are in the Privacy Policy, Section 5B.
10. Suspension and termination
PreShiftIQ may refuse, rate limit, or block any caller, network address, account, assistant product, or Organisation Connection, and may suspend the Assistant Surface or any tool, at any time and without notice, including to protect the Assistant Surface, the Platform, or the people whose records it serves. Persistent abuse results in a block. You may stop using the Assistant Surface at any time; to remove an Organisation Connection, contact info@preshiftiq.com.
11. Availability and change
The Assistant Surface is provided as is and as available. PreShiftIQ may change the tools it offers, the shapes it returns, the assistant products it admits, and the protocol revision it serves; changes to a published shape are versioned rather than silently altered, and deprecations carry notice where the protocol allows it. Public identifiers are the one exception to change: an issued identifier is never reused and always resolves.
12. No warranty; no warranty of match outcomes; limitation of liability
PreShiftIQ makes no warranty about the accuracy, completeness, currency, or fitness of the data the Assistant Surface returns, or about anything an assistant does with it. A match is a measurement of fit between a buyer's stated requirements and a vendor's interview-validated scorecard. PreShiftIQ does not warrant that a matched vendor will accept a match, contact the buyer, respond within any period, or meet the buyer's needs, or that any engagement or contract will result. A signed-in tool's report of an assessment or match is a report of the platform's record at the moment it was read.
To the fullest extent the law allows, PreShiftIQ is not liable for any loss arising from use of the Assistant Surface or from reliance on assistant output derived from it, including a technology selection decision. PreShiftIQ's total liability is limited to the greater of the amount you paid PreShiftIQ for the Assistant Surface, which is nothing, and one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100). Buyers pay nothing to PreShiftIQ at any point.
13. Intellectual property
The PreShiftIQ name, marks, catalog structure, category definitions, coverage statements, delisting policy, public copy, and the assistant-tool manifest are PreShiftIQ's. Vendor names are the vendors'. These terms grant a limited, revocable, non-exclusive permission to retrieve and cite the published data as described in Section 7, and nothing more. Aggregated or de-identified platform data (Privacy Policy, Section 5A) is not available through the Assistant Surface and is licensed separately.
14. Vendors and the published rate
Vendors do not pay for placement, ranking, scoring, or catalog inclusion, at any price, because the mechanism that produces those outputs cannot read the mechanism that produces fees. Vendors pay for outcomes at one published rate, described at /how-we-are-paid. Nothing on the Assistant Surface varies by what any vendor pays.
15. Governing law and contact
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and any dispute is brought in the courts located in New Castle County, Delaware. Questions about these terms go to info@preshiftiq.com. Questions about how PreShiftIQ is paid go to /how-we-are-paid. Questions about data handling go to the Privacy Policy.
16. Changes to these terms
PreShiftIQ may revise these terms. The version and date at the top of this document identify the current terms; earlier versions are retained as history. PreShiftIQ tells the administrator of each Organisation Connection by email before a material revision takes effect. Continued use of the Assistant Surface after a revision takes effect is acceptance of the revised terms.