Quick advice about AI

Whatever you think about AI, it’s here and we all need to brace for impact – positives and negatives. Whether that’s using it to make our lives easier or trying to stop having your creative work nicked.

One thing we know from experience is every new technological change can include employees getting into tricky situations, either deliberately or accidentally.

We’ve just heard about a firm using AI to run various business reports which asked for a financial report showing its cashflow. The report was pretty scary: the firm was not profitable and was going to start losing money within months… and the AI sent the report to all members of staff, because that’s what it had been told to do before.  Just to make a bad situation even worse, it included all sorts of confidential data too including about the firm’s clients.

You don’t need us to tell you to think carefully when using AI or any other software that involves sharing confidential information with a third party supplier.  But you do need to think about your employees and we have some advice about that.

We think this will play out similarly to people using emails and social media: the employment law was quickly settled with a “did you warn them before the problem?” approach.

So if you have something that makes clear any employee action that potentially brings the company into disrepute – like sending an abusive email or a hostile social media post (even on a personal account if that person can be easily linked to your company) – then you can act. We use a belt and braces approach: it’s a clause in employment contracts as well as a policy.

We’re now adding in AI too: if the employee shares data without permission and something goes wrong, you can act. It will take a few years for test cases to go through Employment Tribunals, but we prefer to futureproof things and avoid problems.

But that’s about dealing with a mess (including if it’s been done deliberately). If you’re using AI at work, tell your employees what to do and what to make sure doesn’t happen – before anything goes wrong!

 

By Brian