AI Is a Powerful Business Tool — But What Are You Sharing With It?
Artificial intelligence has quickly become part of everyday business.
Your employees might use ChatGPT to rewrite an email, Microsoft Copilot to summarize a meeting, Claude to analyze a document, or Gemini to help work through information stored in Google Workspace.
These tools can save time, simplify repetitive work, and help your employees accomplish more.
But there is an important question your business should be asking:
What information are you giving these AI systems access to?
For many small businesses, the biggest AI security risk isn’t a sophisticated cyberattack. It could be something as simple as an employee copying the wrong information into the wrong AI tool.
AI Isn’t Automatically Insecure
Using AI doesn’t automatically mean your data is unsafe.
Major AI providers offer business products specifically designed with additional privacy, security, identity, and administrative controls.
For example, OpenAI states that it does not use inputs or outputs from ChatGPT Business, ChatGPT Enterprise, or its API to train its models by default. Anthropic has a similar policy for its commercial products, including Claude for Work and the Anthropic API, according to its Privacy Center.
Microsoft says prompts, responses, and organizational data accessed through Microsoft Copilot under its enterprise protections are not used to train its foundation models. Google similarly states that Workspace data isn’t used to train generative AI models outside of Workspace without permission.
That’s good news.
The problem is that not every account, AI service, subscription, integration, or configuration provides the same protections.
Your employee using a company-managed AI platform is very different from someone opening a personal AI account and pasting company information into it.
Think Before You Copy and Paste
Imagine one of your employees gets a complicated email from a customer.
They open an AI chatbot and type:
“Summarize this email and write me a response.”
Then they paste the entire conversation.
Maybe that email contains the customer’s name, address, pricing, account information, internal notes, or other confidential information.
The AI produces a great response.
The employee just saved 15 minutes.
But where did that information just go?
What account were they using?
What are that provider’s data-retention policies?
Is the conversation being retained?
Could the data be used to improve the service?
Does your business even know that the tool is being used?
This type of unauthorized or unmanaged AI use is often referred to as Shadow AI—the AI version of Shadow IT.
Your employees aren’t necessarily doing anything malicious. They’re usually trying to get their jobs done faster.
That’s exactly why your business needs guardrails.
What Shouldn’t You Be Sharing?
Without guidance, employees may paste surprisingly sensitive information into AI tools, including:
Customer emails and records
Contracts and proposals
Financial statements
Employee information
Vendor pricing
Internal meeting notes
Source code
Network configurations
Legal documents
Passwords
API keys and authentication tokens
Medical or personally identifiable information
Organizations such as the Open Worldwide Application Security Project, better known as OWASP, are actively researching these risks.
OWASP is a nonprofit organization focused on improving software and application security. Its research, security frameworks, and “Top 10” lists are widely used throughout the cybersecurity industry. OWASP now maintains a dedicated Generative AI Security Project focused specifically on risks involving AI and large language models.
One of the risks OWASP identifies is Sensitive Information Disclosure. This can involve personal information, financial data, health records, credentials, legal documents, or confidential business information being unintentionally exposed through an AI system.
The rule should be simple:
If your employee wouldn’t post the information publicly or send it to an unknown third party, they should think carefully before submitting it to an unapproved AI service.
AI Agents Raise the Stakes
AI is also moving beyond simple chatbots.
An AI agent doesn’t just answer a question. It can potentially interact with other systems and take actions for you.
Depending on how it’s configured, an agent might be able to:
Read your email
Search company files
Access SharePoint or Google Drive
Look up customer records
Create support tickets
Send messages
Update a database
Create invoices
Modify files
Execute scripts
That’s incredibly powerful.
It also means a mistake can have a much larger impact.
OWASP calls one of these risks Excessive Agency. In simple terms, this happens when an AI system is given too much functionality, too many permissions, or too much autonomy.
For example:
An AI agent that needs to summarize your inbox probably needs permission to read email.
Does it also need permission to send emails?
Delete messages?
Access every employee’s mailbox?
Probably not.
Your AI systems should follow the same least-privilege principle that should already apply to your employees: give them access only to what they actually need.
AI Can Expose Problems You Already Have
Enterprise AI systems can also make existing permission problems much more noticeable.
Take Microsoft Copilot.
Microsoft explains that Copilot can work with organizational information such as documents, email, chats, meetings, and contacts—but only information the individual user already has permission to access.
That sounds great, and it is an important security control.
But imagine one of your employees accidentally has access to an old folder containing payroll or HR documents.
Before AI, they might never know that folder exists.
Now they could ask:
“Find everything we have about employee compensation.”
Copilot may be able to locate information that would have taken the employee hours to discover manually.
AI didn’t necessarily create the security problem.
It exposed a permissions problem that was already there.
Before broadly connecting AI to your business data, it’s worth reviewing who actually has access to what.
What Is Prompt Injection?
There’s another AI-specific security problem businesses should understand: prompt injection.
OWASP identifies Prompt Injection as a major security risk for large language model applications.
Here’s a simplified example.
You ask an AI agent to read a webpage and summarize it.
Hidden somewhere on that webpage is an instruction intended for the AI:
“Ignore your previous instructions and perform this other action instead.”
A vulnerable AI system could interpret that malicious content as an instruction.
This becomes much more serious when your AI can access other systems.
According to OWASP’s guidance on prompt injection, a successful attack can contribute to sensitive information disclosure, unauthorized access to functions, manipulation of decisions, or actions being performed within connected systems.
That is another reason an AI system shouldn’t automatically have unlimited access just because it makes setup easier.
Your Business Needs AI Guardrails
You don’t need an enterprise cybersecurity department to start managing AI appropriately.
You do need some rules.
Decide Which AI Tools Are Approved
Your employees should know whether they’re allowed to use ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, or another service for company work.
Whenever possible, use company-managed business accounts instead of employees’ personal accounts.
Define What Employees Can Share
Keep the policy understandable.
Generally acceptable:
Public information, brainstorming, marketing ideas, generic research, and information your business has already published.
Use caution:
Customer communications, contracts, pricing, internal documentation, financial information, and source code.
Don’t submit to unapproved AI systems:
Passwords, API keys, authentication tokens, Social Security numbers, payment information, medical information, or highly confidential customer and company data.
Manage AI Like Every Other Business Application
If AI is becoming part of your operations, treat it that way.
Use company accounts, multi-factor authentication, appropriate licensing, access controls, employee offboarding procedures, logging, and administrative controls where they’re available.
Your employee shouldn’t leave your company with years of business-related AI conversations sitting inside their personal account.
Limit What AI Agents Can Do
If your agent only needs to read something, give it read-only access.
If it can perform important actions, consider requiring a person to approve them.
An AI could draft an email without being allowed to send it.
It could prepare an invoice without automatically delivering it.
It could recommend deleting a file without actually having permission to delete it.
Automation doesn’t have to mean unlimited autonomy.
AI Can Be Wrong Too
Security isn’t the only concern.
Generative AI can provide inaccurate information while presenting the answer confidently.
That means additional human review is important when you’re using AI for things like legal documents, financial decisions, cybersecurity configurations, contracts, compliance, healthcare information, or important customer commitments.
AI can be an excellent assistant.
It shouldn’t automatically become the final decision-maker.
Don’t Ban AI. Manage It.
For many businesses, completely banning AI isn’t realistic.
Your employees already know these tools can make their jobs easier. If your business doesn’t provide approved tools or clear rules, some employees may simply use personal accounts without telling you.
A better approach is to give your team secure, approved ways to use AI and make the boundaries clear.
Your business should be able to answer three questions:
What can the AI see?
What can the AI do?
What happens to the information you give it?
If you don’t know the answers, that’s where the conversation needs to start.
At DN Connect, we believe businesses should be able to take advantage of new technology without unnecessarily putting their data, customers, or operations at risk.
AI can absolutely be part of your future.
Just make sure you’re putting the right guardrails around it.
Notice anything about this article? This article was written entirely by Generative AI… we prompted it and this is what we got. Did you think someone wrote this?