Just been given AI at work

Check what your employer allows

• Which tool are you supposed to use? Prefer the work account over a personal one. Personal and work plans often keep data on different terms.
• What are you allowed to paste? If nobody has written it down, ask your manager before you paste customer, staff, financial or confidential material. Use a made-up example until you have an answer.
• What must a person still approve? Anything that is sent to a customer, paid, deleted or published should wait for a person, including you, to say yes.

What not to paste

When you are unsure, use a made-up example and say that it is fake. The longer version is keeping data safe when you use AI tools.

• Passwords, API keys, card numbers and copies of identity documents.
• Health information, and other details your organisation treats as sensitive.
• A whole customer list, a staff file, or a contract, unless that tool is the one your employer has approved for it.
• Instructions that arrived inside an email or document you don’t trust. A chat tool may follow them. Read the data guide if a tool is reading mail on its own.

Five quick wins

Each of these already has a full page: the tools, a prompt and the sources. Try one, not all five.

1. Email replies. A first draft from your own policy or a past answer, which you check and send.
2. Meeting notes. A summary, the decisions and the actions, from notes you are allowed to use.
3. Spreadsheet formulas. Describe the calculation you want, or paste a formula and get it explained. Test it on a copy.
4. A handover. Open work, deadlines and where files live, written down before leave or a new starter.
5. A long document. Questions against a report or pack, with the answer tied back to the text. You still read what matters.

Try one email in two minutes

Use an email you are allowed to share, or rewrite a made-up one. The brackets are the only part you fill in.

Rewrite the email below as three short lines I can edit:
1. What happened, in one line.
2. What I need from the reader, in one line.
3. By when, or "no deadline" if I didn't give one.

Keep my meaning. Take out apologies, backstory and softener phrases. Use simple language an everyday person would understand. If the email is cross, make this version calm and factual. Do not add promises, dates or facts that are not in the email.

EMAIL:
"""
[paste the email you would have sent, with names and account numbers removed]
"""

Got an idea? Test it in 30 minutes

This is a small test, not a business case. You are looking for “useful enough to try again”, and for what went wrong.

1. Write the job in one sentence: who it is for, and what “done” looks like.

2. Pick one real example you are allowed to use. If you are not sure, invent obviously fake details and label them as fake.

3. Run one prompt. The three-line email above is enough if your idea is “make this easier to read”.

4. Compare the answer with the original. Mark what is useful and what is wrong.

5. Write four lines: minutes it took, what you would keep, what you had to fix, what you still do yourself.

6. If the idea would send, pay, delete or publish anything, stop. Read the permissions guide before you connect it to a real system.

7. If a manager wants a number, use the calculator and read how we think about payback. Time saved counts when it is used for other work or avoids a real cost. A feeling of speed is not a saving.

Guides that already fit this

• Keeping data safe when you use AI tools
• What an AI tool may do, and what a person approves
• How to tell whether it pays back
• The payback calculator

Or browse ideas by job.

Sources

1. ICO, Guidance on AI and data protection Regulator guidance
2. NCSC, Guidelines for secure AI system development Government guidance
3. OpenAI, Prompt engineering guide Vendor documentation
4. Anthropic, Prompt engineering overview Vendor documentation