When staff type sensitive information into AI
People want to get the job done. If a fast AI tool is close at hand, they use it, even with sensitive data. The answer is not more bans. It is a tool where everything stays with you.
iSearch
Contents
It almost always starts innocently. A case handler needs to reply to a tricky customer email on a Friday afternoon. She pastes it into a public AI service and asks for a draft. The draft is good, and she gets home on time. But the email contained the customer’s name, identity number and details of the case.
Nobody meant any harm. Still, the data has left the organisation, and it cannot be taken back.
Why it happens
Public AI services are fast, often free and one click away. People in a hurry choose what works. That is not carelessness. It is a sign that the need is real and that the organisation has not offered anything better.
When text is pasted into a public service, it ends up with another party. You do not always know where it is stored, for how long or who can access it, and the terms may allow the content to be used to improve the service. For customer data, that quickly becomes a GDPR question. For contracts, trade secrets and internal analysis, it becomes a confidentiality question.
The first reaction is often to ban it. That is understandable, but it rarely solves the problem. The work does not get easier because the tool is banned, and use on private accounts and phones is invisible. The ban simply moves the risk to a place where nobody can see it. Meanwhile, the organisation misses out on the value staff have already discovered.
Make the secure choice the easy one
The best protection is a tool of your own that people actually want to use. A tool that runs in your own environment, where questions and documents stay with you and are never used to train models.
Then the whole question changes. The organisation no longer has to worry about what users type, because nothing leaves the environment. The customer email, the contract and the meeting notes stay where they belong. The case handler from Friday afternoon can do exactly what she did before, paste in the email and ask for a draft, without anyone needing to worry.
Your own tool has to be as easy as the public one. Otherwise people will go back to it. That means it should be where they work, on desktop and mobile, and it should give answers at least as good. Better, ideally, because it can answer from your own documents and show where the answer came from.
Start with what people already do
Ask staff what they use AI for today. The answers tend to be similar. Replying to emails, summarising long documents, finding the right routine. Start there. When your own tool handles the everyday tasks, the reason to go elsewhere disappears.
Explain clearly why the tool exists. Not as a warning, but as an offer. Here you can work freely, because everything stays with us. Guidelines and training are still needed, but they work far better when there is an approved alternative that is just as easy to use.
How it works in iSearch
The whole chain in iSearch can run in your own environment, the language model included. Everything staff type, and every document the assistant reads, stays with you. Nothing is used to train models.
Every customer gets a separate installation of its own, with SSO, MFA, role-based access and a tamper-evident audit log. The assistants are available on desktop and mobile, and every answer shows which documents were read. That way the organisation can give everyone AI support without worrying about what gets typed in.
Read more about security, see how iSearch is used or book a walkthrough.
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We’ll show you iSearch with your own documents.