How to let your AI assistant check your availability and propose meetings

You can give an AI assistant like Claude or Cursor a live answer to “when am I free?” in about two minutes: create an API key, paste a five-line config into the assistant, and ask. Done properly, the assistant sees your merged availability across every calendar you connect — not the single calendar most integrations read — plus the availability of the people you work with, and it can propose a meeting that lands in your approval queue rather than on your calendar. What it never sees is event content: no titles, attendees, or locations, for you or for anyone else. This guide covers the setup, the questions it can answer, and the honest limits.

Why not just connect the calendar directly?

Most calendar connectors hand the assistant raw events from one account. That fails in two ways. First, the answer to “am I free Thursday 2pm?” is wrong whenever the truth lives in another calendar — and for anyone with a work and a personal calendar, it often does. Second, every event title, description and attendee list flows into the assistant's context, which is a lot of confidential text to hand over for a yes/no question.

An availability layer answers the question instead of dumping the data: merged free/busy, other people's free/busy, mutual-time search — and nothing else crosses.

Setup in three steps

1. Create an API key. In BusyBoard, open Settings → API and create a key. Read access is free; proposing bookings is a Pro scope. The key starts with bb_live_ and is shown once — store it somewhere safe.
2. Add the MCP server to your assistant.BusyBoard hosts an MCP endpoint, so there is nothing to install. Paste this into the assistant's MCP config with your key:

   {
     "mcpServers": {
       "busyboard": {
         "url": "https://busyboard.app/api/mcp",
         "headers": {
           "Authorization": "Bearer bb_live_your_key_here"
         }
       }
     }
   }

   The file location differs per client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor); the agents documentation has the exact path and a local-process option for each.
3. Ask.Restart the assistant and try “When am I actually free tomorrow?” If it answers with times, you're done.

What it can answer

The assistant gets six tools. In plain terms, they let you ask:

• “What does my day look like?”— your own schedule, with full detail, because it's yours.
• “When am I free this week?”— merged across every calendar you've connected, not just one.
• “When is Sam free next week?” — busy/free for a teammate or an external connection, never their event details.
• “Who do I work with?” — the people it can check for you.
• “Find 45 minutes for me, Alice and our client on Thursday.”— mutual-time search that respects everyone's working hours and timezones, including people at other companies.
• “Propose Tuesday 2pm to Dana.”— creates a booking request in Dana's approval queue. A human confirms; the assistant can never commit anyone. Retrying the same request never double-books.

What it never sees

The boundary is structural rather than a setting. For other people, the assistant receives busy or free and nothing else — the same rule that applies to a human looking at their shared availability. That also means no third party's calendar text ever enters your assistant's context, which matters if you care about what your assistant is exposed to.

Honest limits

• Which assistants:any client that supports remote MCP servers with a header for authentication — Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor today. ChatGPT's connectors require OAuth sign-in, which BusyBoard doesn't offer yet.
• Proposing is Pro.Reading your own and others' availability is free; the write scope that lets the assistant propose a meeting is a Pro feature.
• It proposes, it doesn't book.That is the point, not a gap — but if you want an assistant that silently fills your calendar, this isn't it.

Prompts that work well

• “Am I actually free Thursday afternoon, across all my calendars?”
• “Give me three 30-minute options this week that work for me and Priya.”
• “When could Alice, our client Ben, and I all do a call — their time, please?”
• “Propose Wednesday 10am to Dana and tell me when she answers.”