How to keep your business data safe when using AI tools

00:00

When owners ask about AI and privacy, they're usually picturing a data breach. In practice the everyday risk is much more boring: a staff member pastes a customer list into a free account on their phone, and nobody knows it happened. So fixing the account first, providing real access via a business or team account plan is a different product from a free personal login — it gives you control over whether your content is used to train the model, how long conversations are kept, and who in the business has access. On a business plan, your content is not used for training by default.Using personal AI secretly, because businesses have not provided the right tools and guidelines is known as Shadow AI, and is the primary cause of data breach and mistakes when using AI. Go into settings and check two switches: improve the model for everyone, and chat history or retention. Turn training off, set retention to suit you, and write down what you chose so you can answer the question if a client ever asks. Then three house rules, and keep them short enough to remember. One: no full customer databases or exports pasted into a chat — send the one record you're working on. Two: no bank details, tax file numbers or passwords, ever. Three: anything that goes to a client or the tax office, if not anyone external, gets read by a human before it leaves. Next, deal with shadow AI. If you haven't got approved tools, expect that your team is already using their own. Publish a short list — this tool for writing, this one for documents, this one for the quoting task — and make signing up to anything else a conversation rather than a default. In the walkthrough we go through the settings with you, write the house rules in a single page you can hand to staff, and note which tasks should never touch AI in your business. It takes about twenty minutes and it removes most of the worry.