What Not To Tell Your Chatbot

By June Ramli

Perth, Oct 16: Small business owners are turning to AI chatbots to draft emails, summarise documents and get across unfamiliar topics. But many don’t realise their client conversations may be used to train future models, or kept long after they hit delete.
DailyStraits.com asked Nirlep Adhikari, founder of Sydney fractional CTO practice Mount Mindforce and former CTO of LoanOptions.ai, how small businesses can use AI safely. Here’s what he had to say:

How are solo business owners and small businesses using AI day to day, and where does it help most?

The most useful work is routine. Drafting client emails, summarising long documents, writing up meeting notes and getting up to speed on an unfamiliar topic are jobs that used to take an hour and now take minutes. In a one-person business those hours add up quickly.
Where it needs care is anything that depends on judgment about a specific client, like advice, pricing or a decision with real consequences. AI is good at a first draft and only knows what you’ve told it about your client. The people getting the most out of it use it to clear the routine work fast, then spend the time they’ve saved on the parts only they can do.

Many sole traders use a personal ChatGPT or Claude account for their business. What’s the risk?

There are two, and most people only know about the first. On a personal account, your conversations can be used to train future models unless you switch that off. Business accounts come with a contract that rules it out. The two look identical on screen, so plenty of sole traders don’t know which one they’re on.
The second risk is that a personal account keeps everything. Months of client conversations sit in your history, searchable, until you delete them. If someone gets into that account, they get all of it. Most small businesses protect their email carefully and give their chat history no thought, even though it often holds the same information.

Is a business plan worth paying for if you’re a one-person business?

It depends on whether you’re truly on your own. The main business plans are sold for teams. ChatGPT’s needs at least two seats, so a sole trader working alone usually can’t buy one.
If that’s you, use a paid personal plan, switch training off and keep identifying details out of anything you paste in. That covers most of the risk.
Once you have an employee or a regular contractor using AI on client work, move to a business plan. It’s priced per person, the provider agrees in the contract not to train on your data, and you control the accounts. When someone leaves, their access to your client conversations leaves with them.

What should a small business never paste into a chatbot?

Anything that identifies a client together with something sensitive about them. That means things like a client’s name next to their financial position, a contract that still has the other party’s details in it, or an invoice showing an ABN and payment history.
Financial details give away more than people expect. A client’s revenue, industry and state can often be matched to a real company with no name attached.
The fix is to strip identifying details before you paste anything in. The tool does the same job on “a professional services client with this revenue” as on the real file, and most of the risk is gone. If the task can’t be done without the real details, it probably shouldn’t go into a chatbot.

How do you switch off training on your data in the main AI tools?

ChatGPT: open Settings, go to Data Controls and turn off “Improve the model for everyone”.
Claude: open Settings, go to Privacy and turn off “Help improve Claude”.
Both also have a temporary or incognito chat mode that isn’t used for training, which is useful for a one-off sensitive question.
Two things to know. These settings matter on personal accounts, because on a business plan the provider has already agreed not to train on your data. And switching training off only affects conversations from then on. It doesn’t delete anything you’ve already typed, so if you want a clean slate, delete your old conversations too. Menus change from time to time, so if you can’t find the setting, check the provider’s help pages.

What actually happens to a chat after you delete it?

Less than people think. Deleting a chat removes it from your history straight away, but the provider keeps it for a while afterwards under its own retention rules. For the main consumer tools that’s usually around thirty days, and it can be longer if you’ve allowed training or there’s a legal reason to keep it.
That last part has already happened. In the US, a court ordered one provider to preserve user conversations during a lawsuit, including ones users had deleted.
So delete really means removed from your screen. What happens after that is set out in the provider’s privacy policy, and it’s worth five minutes to read it for the tool you use most.

Many small Australian businesses are exempt from the Privacy Act. Does that mean they don’t need to worry about client data and AI?

No. The exemption for businesses under $3 million turnover removes some legal obligations. It doesn’t stop a client walking away when their information ends up somewhere it shouldn’t.
It’s also narrower than many people think. Some small businesses are covered by the Privacy Act regardless of turnover, including health service providers and businesses that buy or sell personal information. Larger clients also increasingly write data handling requirements into their contracts, so a small supplier can be bound by obligations the law itself doesn’t impose.
These habits are cheap to build while you’re small and expensive to retrofit once a client or a regulator asks how you handle their data.

What’s your one rule for using AI safely in a small business?

Don’t put anything into a chatbot you wouldn’t email to a stranger who keeps every email forever.
Everything else follows from that. Apply it and you’ll strip out identifying details without thinking, and you’ll start treating the chat window as a permanent record, which is what it is.
I use these tools every day and build on them for clients. They’re useful, but they have no judgment about what you give them. That part stays with you, and one rule you actually follow beats a detailed policy nobody reads.