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How much to tell AI.
Most of what runs through your business is ordinary and will never cost you a thing. Three or four things will. Nobody ever told you which ones, so you end up holding everything back — and AI hands you something generic. Here's how to tell the difference.
The question isn't "is this secret."
It's: if this ended up somewhere I didn't choose, what would it cost me? For the large majority of what you type in a day, the honest answer is nothing. A routine quote, a job description, a follow-up on an unpaid invoice: nobody gets up in the morning to go read that.
What does cost something you can count on one hand, and it's always the same handful. The rest of the time, there's a simple way to give AI what it needs without handing over the rest.
The same fact, at four heights.
Take a customer who owes you money. You can tell it four ways, and you have probably never had to choose.
The real thing
"Jean Tremblay, 412 Main Street, invoice 4471, $14,200, 60 days late." Everything is there, including the part that isn't yours to give.
Stripped
"A customer, $14,200, 60 days late." The numbers stay, the person disappears. This is the target almost every time.
Shaped
"A customer owes me a mid-five-figure amount, two months late." Enough to reason with, not enough to recognize anyone.
The pattern
"We have trouble getting paid on jobs over $10,000." Useful for thinking, too thin to write a letter with.
What this changes
For just about every question an owner asks — how do I word this, what do I do about it, what am I missing — the answer at level 02 is identical to the answer at level 01. You were paying with your customer's name and getting nothing extra back.
The four things that actually cost something.
Other people's information
Your customers, your staff. It isn't yours to hand over, and it's the only one of the four with a law attached to it in Quebec.
What turns back into a person
A first name on its own is nothing. A first name, a town and a trade is somebody's neighbour. "I took out the last names" is not a finish line.
The keys
Passwords, access, banking: anything that would let someone act as you rather than merely know something.
What you're bound to keep
Client contracts, NDAs, tender documents. You signed for that, and the signature doesn't stop at the assistant's door.
And the four things people guard for nothing.
Your way of working. Your prices. Your own writing. Your plans for next year. The fear is understandable and it's misplaced: an assistant you give none of that to produces exactly the generic output that made you lose faith in AI in the first place.
The trap on the other side
Go too far down the ladder and the answer comes back useless. Frustrated, you paste the whole thing next time. That is how being careful ends up producing exactly what it meant to avoid. Level 02 is the target; level 04 is almost always too thin.
Paste once, not every time.
Most people re-paste raw customer material into every new conversation because they have nothing else to offer as context. A business file written once — what you do, for whom, how you talk, what you refuse — solves that. It's the reusable version of context, and it contains nobody else's information.
That's exactly what the AI 100 series has you build, free, one piece at a time.
If you've already pasted something.
Everyone has. It isn't a disaster, and there are four simple things to do, in order.
Turn off training
In your account settings, check whether your conversations are used to train the model. On free accounts it's often on by default.
Deleting isn't gone
Deleting a conversation removes it from your screen. The vendor's copy follows its own delay, written into its terms.
Move accounts going forward
Customer information in a free personal account is the combination to watch. At minimum, move the work into the business account from here on.
When it's past settings
If it's material covered by a contract or an NDA, it stops being a settings question. Talk to your lawyer.
What the tool itself keeps.
It depends on the vendor, and mostly on the account: the four big ones sell the same assistant twice, once to you as a person and once to your business, and the rules about what you type are not the same. We don't restate that here. It's kept current elsewhere, with each vendor's terms quoted in its own words and dated.