What your team can safely put into ChatGPT, and what they can't

The settings and plan terms of any AI tool change without telling you. So nothing on this page tells you what a setting does. What it gives you instead is a rule and a list that hold whatever your settings say today.

Your service manager pastes a customer's job notes into a chat tool and gets a follow-up email written in nine seconds. It works. It's good, and it's better than the email she would have written at the end of that day.

So what just happened, exactly?

Fair question, and the honest answer for a business your size is shorter than anybody selling you something would like it to be.

Paste the problem, not the person

One rule, and it does more work than everything else on this page combined.

What you want help with is how to word something. A follow-up after a drain job. A polite version of a chase for an unpaid invoice. The explanation of why a quote came in higher than the estimate. None of that needs a name, an address or a phone number in it.

So take them out. Write "the customer" and "their address" and put the real ones back yourself afterward.

Here's what that actually looks like. A job note as a tech writes one, with the real name and address where you'd expect them: "[name], [address], back unit, gate code is on the keypad, dog in the yard, replaced the mixing valve and the stop under the sink, she's out till six so left the invoice in the door."

The version you paste: "Replaced a mixing valve and an angle stop under a bathroom sink. Customer wasn't home. Need a short friendly follow-up asking them to check for drips and to call us if the hot runs cool."

That's it. That's the whole thing. Everything below is only the list of what counts as a person.

And the fair objection: nobody has time for this on a Tuesday afternoon with a customer waiting. Correct, which is why it has to be a habit rather than a decision. The habit is that you type the job rather than the customer from the start, and that costs you nothing, because you were typing either way. The expensive version is the one where you paste the whole note and then try to remember what was in it.

The traffic-light list

Sorted by what the thing is, not by which tool you happen to be using.

Never

• Passwords, logins, and anything out of a password manager.
• Card numbers, bank details, routing numbers.
• Patient records of any kind, in any practice. See the note below.
• A customer's name together with their address, their phone number, and the fact that they're out until six.
• Employee medical details and payroll detail.
• Anything a client contract or a supplier agreement says you can't share. Go and read yours before you decide this one.

Careful, strip it first

• Job notes with a customer name in them. Take the name out and the rest is fine.
• Photos. Check the corners for account numbers, plates, and the stack of mail on the counter.
• Supplier pricing and your own margin. Fine to reason about, not fine to paste as a sheet.
• A resume or an application somebody sent you.
• A complaint that names people, including your own staff.

Fine

• Equipment model numbers, part numbers, error codes.
• Your own published prices and your own marketing copy.
• A procedure you wrote, with names removed.
• The technical question behind the job. "Why would a condenser fan short-cycle in this situation" is just a question.
• Anything already public.

The paste line

Fine

• Equipment model numbers, part numbers, error codes

• Your own published prices and your own marketing copy

• A procedure you wrote, with names removed

• The technical question behind the job

• Anything already public

Never

• Passwords, logins, and anything from a password manager

• Card numbers, bank details, routing numbers

• Patient records of any kind, in any practice

• A customer's name with their address, phone number and the fact that they're out until six

• Employee medical details and payroll detail

• Anything a client contract or supplier agreement says you can't share

The lineTake the person out of it, and what is left is fine.

So the amber band is the whole job. Every item in it is a thing somebody will need to paste on a Tuesday afternoon with a customer waiting, and the decision has to be fast enough to make in the moment or it won't get made at all.

Which is why the answer is a habit rather than a judgment. Take the person out. If you can't, don't paste it.

The three bands by trade

Plumbing, HVAC, electrical. Your amber band is job notes and photos. Strip the address. And the gate code is sitting in those notes too, which is the part people forget because it doesn't look like personal information.

A dental practice or any medical office. Your red band is wider than everyone else's and we draw it in the same place every time: no patient information at all, in any consumer tool. That is our own line and we hold it even when a practice pushes back, because the alternative is us deciding something we have no standing to decide. Moving it is your compliance person's call, not ours and not a vendor's.

An agency or consultancy. Your red band is set by your own client agreements, and you may already have signed something that answers this. Unreleased work, client numbers and the client list are the three that end relationships.

A shop or small manufacturer. Drawings, supplier prices, and quoted margin. A drawing is the easiest thing on this list to paste without thinking, because it looks like a picture rather than like a document.

Whose account is it

Two accounts look identical on a screen. Only one of them is yours.

In a business we have just walked into, this is the first thing we check. Before any rule, before any list, because it takes ten seconds and the answer changes what the rest is worth. Ask whose email the account is on. If it's a personal address, every conversation in that account can walk out with the person holding it, and so can your ability to find out what was ever in there.

That's the whole argument for buying seats, and it isn't about trust. It's about whether you can switch something off.

Notice what that argument didn't need. No reading of anybody's terms, no opinion about which agreement governs what. Ownership is a question you can answer by looking at an email address, which is why we start there instead of with the paperwork.

The two questions we ask a vendor

We don't print the answers, because the answers expire. The questions don't, so here they are, in the words we send them.

A good answer to that one is boring and specific and arrives in a sentence. A bad answer is a paragraph about encryption, which is an answer to a question nobody asked.

Ask both, name the plan, and get it back in writing. If a sales engineer offers to walk you through it on a call instead, that is worse than silence, because a call leaves you holding a feeling where a sentence should be. Ask again for the sentence.

Then write the answer and the date you got it on your own policy page. Forty seconds, and it saves the same argument happening twice in March.

Here's why we bother with the second question at all. Everybody worries about the first one, and the first one is mostly about how long an inconvenience lasts. The second is about whether the thing you typed stops being only yours.

Three things to check in your own account

Fifteen minutes, once, and then you have an answer instead of an opinion.

The one people skip is the second. It feels administrative and it is the one with teeth, because an account you don't own is an account you can't audit, can't close, and can't hand to the next person who does that job.

Three checks in your own account

1. Find the controls for what is kept and what trains the model

   Read what they say today. Write the date you read them on your policy page.

2. Find out who owns the account

   If it's a staff member's personal email, fix that before anything else on this list.

3. Find the conversation that isn't saved

   Learn where it is and show one other person. A control nobody can find is a control you don't have.

If something already went in

Don't start with blame. Start with the record, because the record is the only thing that lets anybody give you a real answer later.

Four facts, written down the same day. What went in, as specifically as the person can remember. Which account it went into, by the email that owns it. Roughly when. And who else has seen it since.

Then change any password that was in it, and stop.

Who outside the company gets told is not our call and not this page's call. That is the same person you'd phone about a laptop left in a cab, and the four facts above are the first thing they'll ask you for. Write them, hand them over, and let them decide.

What we do next, in our own engagements, is the dull part nobody asks about. We go and look at how it happened, because a leak is almost never somebody being careless with a rule they knew. It's a rule that lived nowhere, or an account nobody owned, or a photograph that didn't look like a document. Fix the one that caused it and you've closed the thing that would have caused the next one.

If something already went in

1. Needs a person

   Tell the named person

   The same day. Whoever is named on your policy page.

2. Recorded

   Write down what went in

   Which account it went into, and roughly when.

3. Needs a person

   Change any password

   Any that was in it.

4. Not your call

   Then stop

   Who outside the company gets told is decided by whoever you would phone about a lost laptop.

• Needs a person
• Recorded
• Affirmed

Put the answer somewhere people will see it

You now have a rule and a list. On their own they live in your head, which is the same as nowhere.

Write it on one page, because the amber band needs a judgment call and judgment calls made alone at seven at night go the convenient way. One page, one named person to ask, and the list above as line 3. That's the one-page AI policy, and it's free to copy.

Then teach the amber band, because it's the only part people get wrong in good faith. A first-month plan for a small team covers how.

And put a date on the page. Not because the rule changes, because the list does, the moment somebody adds a tool or you take on a kind of work you weren't doing before.

The question behind the question

Underneath all of this there's a different question, and it's about control. Who in your business is using these tools, on what, and does anybody read the output before a customer does?

Try to answer this for last week. Of everything your customers read, how much of it started as a draft from a tool? And who read it after?

If you can't answer that, pasting isn't your biggest problem.

The free AI readiness check is twenty questions, one tap each, about four minutes. Your finding and all five areas land on screen the moment you finish. Two of the five are about exactly this, which is who checks and what's written down.

One rule to keep

We train teams on the amber band. We build the check into the process so it stops depending on anybody's memory. Or we do the work and check it for you.

If you take one thing off this page, take that. Everything else here is a way of finding out which parts of your week it already covers.