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Want to know the most common AI question in businesses? Salary information.

"What does John in accounting make?" "Show me the salary ranges for marketing roles." "Who got the biggest raise last year?"

If your AI has access to HR data, it's answering these questions. And that could cause some shit.

Your AI Could Be Leaking Everything (And You'd Never Know It)

Everyone's rushing to implement AI in their business. ChatGPT for customer service. AI assistants for employees. Automated everything.

But nobody's talking about data governance. And that's going to cost them everything.

I just finished cleaning up a mess where a company's AI chatbot had been trained on their entire file server. Customer records, financial data, employee information - everything. When employees asked it questions, it would sometimes spit out other people's private information.

Or sometimes worse… It would give old information (like PTO data) and cause personnel and scheduling issues.

How Your AI Becomes a Security Nightmare

Employees share customer records, financial results, and even credentials with chatbots or AI copilots, often from devices that security teams cannot monitor. Once this data enters an AI system, it cannot be pulled back.

Here's what I see happening:

Training Data Disasters: Companies feed AI systems their entire database without thinking about what's in there. Social security numbers, credit card data, private conversations - it all becomes part of the AI's knowledge base.

Prompt Injection Attacks: Hackers figure out how to manipulate your AI's responses. They ask seemingly innocent questions that trick the AI into revealing sensitive information it shouldn't have access to.

Data Leakage Through Responses: Your AI gets trained on confidential documents, then accidentally includes details from those documents in responses to other users.

Cross-Contamination: One employee's query accidentally pulls up another employee's private information. Your AI can't tell the difference between what different people should see.

What Data Governance Actually Means

Before you deploy any AI, you need to know exactly what data it can access and how it will use that data.

Data Classification: Label everything. Public, internal, confidential, restricted. Your AI should only access data appropriate for its purpose.

Access Controls: Just because Sarah can see customer addresses doesn't mean your customer service AI should have access to customer payment history.

Data Retention: How long does your AI remember conversations? What happens to sensitive data after interactions?

Audit Trails: You need to track what data your AI accesses and how it uses that information.

The Right Way to Do This

Start with data mapping. Know exactly what sensitive information you have and where it lives.

Implement data loss prevention. Systems that prevent sensitive data from leaving your organization through AI interactions.

Create AI usage policies. Clear rules about what employees can and can't ask your AI systems.

Regular security audits. Test your AI systems for data leakage and unauthorized access.

Employee training. People need to understand the risks of sharing sensitive information with AI tools.

The Bottom Line

AI without proper data governance is like giving everyone in your company admin access to everything. Eventually, someone's going to see something they shouldn't.

Don't be the business that makes headlines because their AI leaked customer data or employee salaries.

Set up proper data governance before you implement AI, not after you have a problem.

Your data is only as secure as your weakest AI prompt.

Until next week,

—Jared 

Text Me: 314.806.3912

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