Controlling the company facts you share with AI

Safe is the wrong question

Asking whether an AI tool is safe invites a general answer to a specific problem. The same tool can be appropriate for one class of information and unacceptable for another, and its terms differ between consumer, team and enterprise plans and between providers. Terms also change. The durable question is which facts are cleared to be shared, under which terms.

Classify the facts first

A company already distinguishes, informally, between what is public, what is shared with partners and what is internal. Governance writes it down in classes tied to a rule for AI use.

• Public: published catalog, specifications, locations, announcements. May be used freely.
• Partner: pricing tiers, territory, distributor agreements, dealer data. Shared only under terms that exclude training and define retention.
• Confidential: customer records, contracts, financials, internal policies, authority limits. Not entered into external tools without a reviewed arrangement.
• Restricted: credentials, personal data, regulated records. Never.

Match each class to terms

For each class the allowed destinations are named, not left to individual judgment. A destination is a provider and a plan, with its documented terms on training use, retention, access by the provider, deletion and regional processing. Those terms are read from the provider's current documentation and recorded with the date they were read, since they can change underneath a standing policy.

The record is the control

A policy nobody can audit is a statement of intent. The control is a record of what was shared: which fact, which class, which destination, who approved it, when. For recurring flows such as a catalog export or a dealer file sent to an assistant, the record is generated by the process rather than remembered.

The same record serves the other direction. Facts that go to AI systems should be the checked ones, with sources and dates, so what an assistant reads about the company is what the company confirmed.

Authority limits for agents

When an assistant is permitted to act (read a system, draft a quote, update a record), the record also states what it may do without approval. Read access to a class, drafting and approving are separate permissions. The boundary between automation and human approval is set per class of fact, and changes only by a recorded decision.

This is the governance layer described in Business Truth: the facts, their classes and their authorities, in one place.

Questions