Vacations are magical, but driving on unfamiliar roads can be super stressful especially when you don’t know how fast to go.

Out in Arizona last month, headed to Sedona in the dark on an eight-lane highway, hungry, tired, and more than a wee bit stressed, only the speed limit shown on Apple Maps gave me any sense of how fast I should be going.

Thankfully, I could glance down and check it every few minutes. It was a calming touchpoint I relied on to get me down the road without a speeding ticket.

By the same token, wouldn’t it be nice if, when we use an AI tool, we had the same simple indication of how private our data is and what to do if we want to protect it?

Yup, it would be.

I think it’s the absolute least we should expect from companies solving previously unsolvable math problems and inventing new treatments for diseases.

They won’t.

Which means you must keep a few things top of mind to protect your sensitive and proprietary data. And this goes double if you are a business owner or manage people.

The Slippery Slope Is Steep

It took me 39 seconds to create a new ChatGPT account and start uploading documents. The account came complete with “Improve the model for everyone” on by default meaning OpenAI could use my chats and data to train its models.

The assumption every AI frontier lab makes now is they can do with your data as they please. And they don’t all disclose that to a user when an account is created.

The onus is on us to protect our data. We bear the responsibility to make sure we’re using these powerful platforms and tools responsibly.

Put plainly, that sucks, especially if you’re a business owner or manager.

In that case, the number of things you need to balance is incredible. The pace and the demands are mind-boggling.

And now your employees have the ability to, in 39 seconds, hand over all your intellectual property to an AI lab.

You say you have a policy for that?

Big deal.

Policy Schmolicy

According to a 2026 state of workplace communication Axios report, only 26% of staff who responded to the study said their organization has clear, enforced AI use policies. That’s a problem because 43% of bosses surveyed think they have clear AI policies.

While that could be resolved through clear and repeated communication, it doesn’t include the more than half of bosses who do not have clear AI policies.

I’ve talked with more than one business owner who doesn’t have an AI policy yet. And while it may seem like early days, it only takes one key bit of information winding up in the wrong place to cause harm.

The time to act is before that happens.

How To Protect Yourself

The first step is to check your settings. Use my 10-Minute AI Privacy Audit to walk through settings in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to help protect your data and privacy.

The walkthrough will help you get familiar with the settings screens and will explain the “why” behind many of the recommendations. It’s a good, solid initial action.

And if you are a business owner or manager, you should work with me to design and communicate to your team a simple, common sense AI policy. Get started by booking a free 30-minute conversation with me today.

We’ll discuss what you want your policy to cover, if you’ve already communicated a policy, and if you want help understanding all the ways your team is using AI now. Then we’ll get to work.

Because we’re all speeding down the same AI super highway together. The pace of the traffic isn’t going to slow down, so the time to protect yourself is now.