™The most common worry owners raise about AI is privacy. It's a fair worry, and it's manageable once you know how the plans and settings work.
Free, paid and business plans
Details vary by provider and change over time, but the general pattern looks like this:
- Free plans have usage limits and may not include the most capable models. Depending on the provider and your settings, your conversations may be used to improve future models.
- Paid individual plans give you more use, better models and more features. Most let you control whether your chats are used for training.
- Business and team plans add admin controls and shared workspaces, and providers generally commit not to train their models on your business data. Read the terms to confirm.
A paid plan per person often costs less each month than an hour or two of most people's time. If someone uses AI daily, it usually pays for itself.
Find the data settings
Most AI assistants have a setting that controls whether your conversations can be used to train future models, and options for how long chats are kept. They're usually under Settings, in a section called something like Data Controls or Privacy.
Take five minutes and find them in whichever tool your team uses. Decide on purpose, rather than leaving it to the default.
What not to paste in
Unless you're on a business plan you've reviewed and approved, keep these out of AI tools:
- Customer personal details: home addresses, dates of birth, ID numbers
- Passwords, access codes and account numbers
- Health information
- Confidential contracts and anything covered by a nondisclosure agreement
- Employee records and payroll details
Often you can remove names and identifying details and still get exactly the help you need.
Three rules to give your team
The biggest risk in most small businesses isn't the AI. It's everyone using their own free account with company information, and nobody knowing what's been shared. Three short rules fix most of it:
- Use the approved tool. Name the AI assistant the business uses, on the business's account.
- Know what stays out. Share the "what not to paste in" list above.
- A person checks before it goes out. Anything a customer will see gets read by a human first.
Write them down, share them, and revisit them every few months.