AI automation
Your Team Is Probably Already Using AI. Here Is How to Make It Safe
Generative AI use at work has grown quickly. A short policy and approved tools are better than hoping nobody uses it.
Adoption happens from the bottom up
Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries, reported that the use of generative AI at work had nearly doubled in the previous six months. In many companies people are trying these tools on their own, whether or not the business has chosen a tool or written a rule.
Why that matters
Public AI tools are convenient, but pasting customer lists, contracts or financial data into a tool you do not control can expose information the company is responsible for protecting. The problem is rarely bad intent. It is that nobody told people what is acceptable.
A short policy that works
Keep it to a page. List the tools the company has approved, and say which data must never be entered into public tools, such as personal data, passwords and unpublished financials. Name a person to ask when unsure. Provide an approved alternative that is actually good enough, because people use unofficial tools when the official ones are worse. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is a useful reference for organizing these controls.
An approved alternative
MayTech Labs builds private AI assistants that answer from a company's own documents, so staff get the convenience without sending data to a public service.
