Draft AI policies for your team

During 2023, artificial intelligence went from being a curiosity to being inside offices: employees pasting text into a chatbot, salespeople drafting emails with an assistant’s help, someone in operations uploading a file “to get it summarized.” The technology ran faster than the rules, and with it came a very concrete need: defining in writing what can and can’t be done. It’s not a corporate whim; it’s the way to avoid legal scares and to protect the most valuable thing your company has, which is its information.

The good news is that you don’t need a law firm or a hundred-page manual to start. A clear AI policy can fit on a couple of pages and make an enormous difference. At Normandia Web we see it this way: simple rules, applied with common sense, let your team take advantage of these tools with confidence and without exposing data you can’t recover later.

Why does your business need rules today?

When there’s no policy, everyone decides on their own. And those decisions, made with good intentions, can end up with confidential customer information traveling to servers you don’t control, or with published text that no one reviewed. The risk isn’t AI itself; it’s using it without judgment.

A policy contains that risk before it turns into a problem. It tells your people what information they can share, with what tools, and under what precautions. That way you keep your data, your processes, and your history under your control, instead of scattering them across services you don’t know how they handle your information.

An AI policy doesn’t aim to slow down your team: it aims to give them safe ground to move fast.

What a simple policy should include

There’s no need to cover every imaginable scenario. Focus on what truly protects your company and your customers:

• What data is never shared. Personal customer information, financial data, passwords, contracts, and anything covered by confidentiality. If in doubt, don’t upload it.
• Which tools are approved. Define a short list of allowed platforms instead of leaving it open. Fewer options, more control.
• Mandatory human review. Everything that comes out of AI (emails, texts, analysis) passes through a person before being used or published. AI suggests; someone on your team decides.
• Clear owners. Name who to go to with questions and who authorizes exceptions. Without an owner, the policy gets forgotten.
• Good usage practices. How to write good instructions, how to verify data, and why never to blindly trust an answer.

Common mistakes worth avoiding

The first is writing a document so long and technical that no one reads it. A policy that isn’t understood protects no one. Write it in your team’s language, with concrete examples from your day-to-day.

The second mistake is leaving it in a drawer. A policy works when people know it, discuss it, and know how to apply it. Devote a short meeting to it, resolve doubts, and keep it within reach. And the third is treating it as something final: technology changes, so review it every so often and adjust it with what you learn.

How to draft yours this week

If you don’t have anything in writing yet, these steps give you a clear, realistic start:

• Start with one page. Gather the five or six most important rules for your operation and put them in a single document. You can expand it later.
• Talk to your team first. Ask how they’re already using AI. You’ll discover practices worth organizing and others worth stopping immediately.
• Name an owner. Someone who resolves doubts and keeps the document alive. They don’t have to be an expert; they do have to be available.
• Communicate it and train. A short meeting to explain it is worth more than twenty emails. Make sure everyone knows what’s allowed and what isn’t.
• Review it every quarter. Adjust based on what works and on the new tools that keep appearing.

Setting clear rules isn’t distrusting your team: it’s giving them certainty to work better and with judgment. If you want to integrate AI into your processes safely, with custom software that adapts to how you work today, at Normandia Web we can sit down with you to draft your first policy and take the first step without surprises.