What not to paste into an AI chatbot at work

Someone on your team has a long customer complaint to answer, so they copy the whole email thread into a free AI chatbot and ask for a polite reply. The reply is good and it saves half an hour, but the customer's full name, home address, phone number and order history are now sitting on another company's servers, under terms nobody at your business has read. The same thing happens with invoices pasted in for a quick summary, contracts pasted in for a plain-English version, a spreadsheet of client contacts pasted in to fix the formatting, and now and then a password pasted in by someone asking why a login keeps failing. Nobody is being careless on purpose, they're trying to get through a busy day. In our experience owners usually don't know it's happening, and that's where AI privacy for business starts: knowing what goes into these tools and putting a simple rule around it.

What should stay out of the chat box

A useful test is this: if you wouldn't email it to a stranger at another company, don't paste it into a chatbot you haven't checked. In practice that covers four kinds of information.

Customer personal data

Names together with home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth or anything else that points to one specific person. The risk grows with detail. A first name in a general question tells the tool very little, while a forwarded thread with signature blocks hands over everything about that customer.

Payment and health details

Bank account numbers, payment details, tax ID numbers, Social Security numbers in the US and National Insurance numbers in the UK. Health information belongs here too, and it turns up in more places than owners expect: a gym's injury notes, a salon's allergy record, a home care schedule, a dental practice's appointment reasons. Health data often carries extra rules wherever you operate, so treat it as off limits by default.

Passwords, keys and login codes

Passwords, the one-time codes sent by text, the answers to security questions, and the long access codes that connect your website or booking system to other services (often called API keys). These should never go into any chat window. If someone has already pasted one, the fix is simple and urgent: change that password or create a new access code today, and delete the old one.

Contracts and internal documents

Client contracts, supplier pricing, staff matters and anything marked confidential. Many contracts limit sharing with outside parties, and a chatbot provider is an outside party, so pasting a client agreement in for a summary can break a promise you signed.

Check the data and training settings first

Before anyone uses a tool for work, spend a few minutes in its settings. Open the account menu, go to Settings, and look for a section with a name like Data controls or Privacy. Here's what to look at:

• Training: find the option that lets the provider use your conversations to improve its models, and switch it off. On many free and personal plans it's on by default.
• History and deletion: see whether chats are saved and how they can be deleted. Turning off training doesn't always mean nothing is stored, because providers often keep conversations for a period for safety checks.
• Temporary chats: some tools offer a private or temporary mode that isn't saved to history. It's handy for one-off questions.
• The plan itself: business and team plans usually state in writing that business data isn't used for training, and they give an admin one place to control settings for every staff account.

Good looks like this: the provider's terms say in plain words that your data isn't used for training, an owner or manager controls the settings for everyone, staff sign in with work accounts you can close when someone leaves, and chats can be deleted. If a tool can't show you those things, keep it for questions that contain nothing about your customers or your business.

How to strip a message before pasting it

Most of what staff want from a chatbot doesn't need personal details at all. The tool needs the situation, and the situation can be described without names. Before pasting, go through the text and:

• replace names with roles, such as "the customer" or "Supplier A"
• delete signature blocks and contact details, or swap them for placeholders like [address]
• remove order numbers and account numbers
• cut anything the task doesn't need, such as earlier replies in a long thread

Here's what that looks like in practice. Pasting the whole complaint thread gives the tool a name and a home address it has no use for. Writing this instead gives it everything it does need:

"A customer says their order arrived late and the item inside was damaged. They're upset and want a refund. Write a calm reply that apologizes and offers either a replacement or a full refund."

Then paste the draft into your own email, add the customer's name yourself, and read it through before sending. The same idea works for contracts: copy only the clause you have a question about, with the party names replaced, and ask about that clause.

AI privacy for business owners in the UK and the US

If your business is in Greater Manchester, you also have duties under UK GDPR for the personal data you hold about customers and staff. Putting that data into an outside tool is a use of it, so it has to fit with how you've told people you'll handle their information. If you're not sure a tool fits, ask whoever advises you on data protection before staff start using it, and write the answer down.

In South Florida the rules depend more on your industry and the kind of data involved, and contracts with clients or partners can add their own limits. Whatever the rules say, customers on both sides of the Atlantic react the same way when they find their complaint or their address somewhere they didn't expect, and that reaction is usually what costs a business the most.

A one-page rule for your staff

A rule nobody reads won't help, so keep it short enough to fit on one printed sheet. Here's a version you can copy and adapt:

AI tools at work

1. Use only the AI tools on our approved list, signed in with your work account.
2. Never paste customer names with contact details, payment or bank details, health information, passwords or access codes, or contracts and confidential documents.
3. Rewrite first: replace names with roles and remove any number that identifies a person or an account.
4. Treat the tool's answer as a draft, and check names and amounts before anything goes to a customer.
5. If you pasted something you shouldn't have, tell the owner the same day. Nobody gets in trouble for reporting it, and we can usually fix it by changing a password or deleting a chat.
6. If you're unsure, ask before you paste.

Fill in the approved list underneath, with the name of each tool and the plan you're paying for. Go through the sheet at a team meeting so everyone hears it once, and look at it again whenever you add a new tool or someone new joins.

How Pixedi handles this in Care

Care, $250 a month, covers website care and security, email health and watching your business's online accounts, which is usually where trouble from a leaked password shows up first. If something looks wrong with a login or an account, we raise it with you, and the monthly report says what we checked and what changed. Writing or tailoring a staff rule like the one above isn't part of the plan, but we can do it as out-of-scope work at $120 an hour, quoted in writing first.

This week, open the AI tool your staff use most, go to its settings and check whether conversations are being used for training. Then print the rule above with your approved tools listed underneath, and hand it out at your next team meeting.

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