Five things your team should never paste into a public AI tool

Five things your team should never paste into a public AI tool. Number four is the one everyone does.

AI belongs in your business. I say that as someone who builds it for a living. Your customers' data, though, does not belong in a public chat window.

Never paste:

1. A customer's identifiers. Name, tax ID, account number, phone. Anonymize first, then ask whatever you want.
2. A contract with the other party's name on it. The structure is fine to share. The name is not.
3. Data you licensed from someone else. You signed terms for it. The chat window did not.
4. Your price list, your margins, your decision rules. That is the business. And it is the first thing someone pastes "to get help with the logic".
5. Code or files with credentials in them. Connection strings travel with the snippet, and nobody notices till later.

What you can paste: the shape of the problem, made-up sample rows, the structure of the process, the draft of the document.

The rule that covers all five: if you would not email it to a vendor without a contract, do not paste it.

Which one happens in your company?