AI is cool. It’s kind of fun. Some say it’s a little scary. All of those things are true.
AI tools can provide a tremendous productivity boost for your business. They also can be dangerous.
Security, privacy and accuracy are not always cool and fun, but they’re incredibly necessary. AI tools present risk. As a business owner, you need to be aware of the risks and ensure your employees understand those risks.
Unlike large enterprises, small and mid-sized businesses often don’t have an IT department or a compliance department. This makes proactive AI governance essential.
In short: If you run a business, you need a written AI policy. This policy is necessary even if content creation isn’t a core part of your business. It needs to be written not as a rigid set of rules, but as guidelines that can evolve as the technology evolves and leaves room for experimentation and innovation.
Like every technology, AI has risks. Some of those risks can mean problems for your business. Here are just a few:
Data security. If you are using a free version of one of the popular AI models, it can use everything you type or paste into that tool for training purposes. This includes anything that would be considered confidential or proprietary, such as recipes, processes or other forms of intellectual property. If you are using a paid or enterprise version of an AI tool, ensure that your prompts and data are excluded from model training.
Brand protection. Yay, no more searching for stock photos or clip art or graphics! Just tell AI what you want to illustrate and in minutes, you have it right there, downloadable and totally free. Right? Well, yeah. But: It is worth considering that a large number of your customers may not think AI is as cool as you think it is. AI images are still generally quite identifiable as such. It may not be an issue for your brand, but it’s not something to automatically dismiss.
Being wrong. “AI can make mistakes.” It’s right there as a disclaimer on every one of the commonly used tools. It’s there for a reason. Using AI images in your marketing materials might be a problem for your brand. Putting out wrong information under your name definitely will be a problem for your brand. If you’re building blog posts or marketing copy using AI, make sure you double-check it for accuracy the same way you would if the copy was produced by a human. Same with research: AI is an absolutely fabulous research tool, and it will absolutely save you time in gathering material. However, that material should always be carefully vetted.
Build your company’s AI policy with these concerns in mind. But also allow for experimentation and learning. If you want to truly encourage this experimentation, investing in a paid account even at the lowest levels — often around $20-$30 a month — will help keep experimentation within guardrails.
Your company should have an acceptable use policy for all of its technology resources that governs the usage of any company-issued device. AI tools need to be part of this policy — even tools that are built in to the hardware. A written policy on use and verification will help you avoid situations like this recent incident at a newspaper in Wisconsin, where an employee used an AI tool because the tool was on the employee’s laptop and ended up in hot water for creating an article that was factually incorrect.
Do you need to tell your customers how you use AI in every instance? Maybe not. But if there is any question about whether you should disclose whether AI was used in the creation of your content, imagery or anything else, then you should disclose it.
Our disclosure: RJW Growth Partners does not use AI to create anything — all of our marketing imagery, blog posts, web site copy and social media posts are created by humans. We purchase imagery from stock image libraries, or through subscriptions to tools such as Canva. However, we do use AI to edit and analyze almost everything we write. We will sometimes incorporate those changes, and sometimes we will not — just the same way we would if we were working with a human editor. We use OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Business tool, for which we pay $30 per user per month. (As of 2025, it’s $25 per user per month if you pay annually.)
We also experiment with AI coding tools and AI assistance built into tools such as Airtable. We’ll use what we learn from these experiments to guide you in your business’s path toward building point solutions specific to your enterprise using AI.
Use AI. Experiment. See where it works for you and where it falls short. Keep in mind that the version of any AI tool you’re using today is the worst version of that tool that will exist. The technology is improving and while it may not yet be the game-changer that the hype suggests, it definitely can make your business more productive and better able to serve its customers.
We’re here to help. Get in touch for a free AI consultation and let’s talk about how you can experiment with confidence.
10 things to include in your AI policy from brightmine.com
Transparency and authenticity standards from c2pa.org
Federal Trade Commission AI guidelines and practices from ftc.gov
Podcast: The AI Forecast from cloudera.com