Privacy and risk
How to keep your business data safe when using AI tools
A practical 5 minute walkthrough of the settings, account types and simple house rules that keep customer and financial data safe when your team uses AI tools.
5 min 30 sec · full transcript below
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We're filming this walkthrough now. The full script is published below word for word, so nothing is being held back — read it in a couple of minutes, or call or email us and we'll talk you through it.
The short version
- Business or team accounts behave differently from free personal accounts — start there.
- Turn off training on your content and check data retention settings.
- Agree three simple house rules on what never gets pasted in.
- Keep a short list of approved tools so staff stop signing up on their own.
Chapters
- 0:00 The real risk isn't what owners think
- 1:00 Account type and training settings
- 2:40 Three house rules for staff
- 4:00 Approved tools list and shadow AI
- 5:00 What we set up during the audit
Full transcript
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.
01:00
So fix the account first. A business or team 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.
01:50
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.
02:40
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 gets read by a human before it leaves.
04:00
Next, deal with shadow AI. If you haven't approved tools, 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.
05:00
In the audit 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 ten minutes of the forty-five and it removes most of the worry.
Questions owners ask about this
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The 45 - 60 minute AI audit is $599 incl GST, one-off, and covers your task and ROI report, guided set-up and AI basics training.
Book my AI Audit — $599More in this series
Next steps
Where most owners go from here.
- How to choose AI tasks and toolsThe written guide behind this walkthrough, in more depth.
- How we augment AI tools for repeatable tasksWhat a Skill, Gem, CustomGPT or App actually is, in plain English.
- Client stories from Melbourne's westWhat these tasks returned for real local businesses.
- Small business AI FAQCost, time, set-up effort and data privacy, answered plainly.
Want a second opinion on your own task list?
Bring the jobs that eat your week and we'll talk through which of them AI can genuinely take on, and what that would be worth to you. The 45 - 60 minute AI audit is $599 incl GST, one-off, and includes your task and ROI report, guided set-up and AI basics training.
Prefer to talk first? Call or email us.