AI tools are cheap and take about five minutes to get going. That’s the appeal: five minutes in, and your work suddenly gets easier. It’s also by far the easy bit.
What the tool does once it’s inside your business is where the risk and the reward sit.
Where does the risk sit when you use AI in your business?
It shows up in three places: what goes in, whose work it is, and how it sounds.
What goes in. Every time someone pastes in a client email, a draft proposal or a spreadsheet to get it tidied up, that information has left your building. Depending on the tool, the plan and the settings, it may be stored or used to improve the product. Plenty of people haven’t checked which applies to them.
Whose work it is. Your clients trust you with their documents, their numbers and their ideas. Many contracts and NDAs spell out what you can do with that material, and most were written before anyone was typing it into a chatbot.
How it sounds. This one is easy to miss when you’re time poor. The work comes back looking polished, often tidier than a rushed first draft. But does it still sound like you, or like the generic slop everyone else is putting out now?
“The businesses that get the most out of AI will be the ones that decided how and when to use it.”
Is an AI Policy enough?
A policy is a good idea and you should have one. But a policy alone won’t change what people do. It’s the setup around the tool that decides how things go, and that raises three more questions.
Does your insurance cover AI?
If something goes wrong with client data or advice that AI helped write, it’s worth knowing where you stand before it happens, not after.
Has your team been shown how to use AI well?
Most people learn by trying, which means everyone has a different habit, and you only hear about the bad ones when a client does.
Who decides when your AI rules change?
Someone has to own the rules. The tools shift every few months, so that person needs to tell people when the rules have changed, and notice when the team has drifted back to old habits. That’s a change process, not a document.
The businesses that get the most out of AI will be the ones that decided how and when to use it.
See how we use AI at The Lever
Join us for a free one-hour online session:
Date: Wednesday 28 October 2026
Time: 12 to 1pm (bring your lunch)
Where: Zoom (link will be sent when you register)
We’ll show you how we use AI at The Lever, including the checks we run before anything goes out with our name on it. You’ll see real examples, including the times it got things wrong. Then we’ll open it up for your questions.
Register now and add the one question you’d most like answered. We’ll build the Q&A around what you send in.
Can’t make it? Register anyway, send your question, and we’ll email you the recording afterwards.