The worry I hear most on my calls
For everyday business work, yes, as long as you choose your account carefully, check the data settings before you start and keep a few things out of it altogether. The bigger risk isn’t the tool itself, it’s not knowing which settings you have agreed to.
Henny Maltby25 years in marketing · Growth Hub Premier Partner · 21 October 2026
!Worried about client confidentiality? Check your settings before you paste anything in.
On a call last week, a coach I spoke to was worried about connecting AI to her email because of client confidentiality. It is exactly the right question to ask.
My answer was simple: what you connect stays in your own account and isn’t shared, so choose your provider and check its settings first.
The rest of this post is how to do that: the one setting that decides whether your chats are used for training, what changes between free, paid and business accounts, what you should never paste in, and a simple safety checklist you can work through in ten minutes.
What you connect stays in your own account.
You are not alone
Because your business runs on trust, and handing information to a tool you don’t understand feels like a risk to that trust. You are not alone in feeling it.
A 2026 Simply Business survey of UK small business owners found security and privacy concerns are the top barrier to using AI, named by 44%.
An IONOS and YouGov survey of UK small business decision makers found 51% fear data theft.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, ran events with small business owners and said the very first questions were about privacy, starting with whether their data is used to train the models.
The one setting that decides it
“Training” means the company uses conversations to help improve future versions of its AI. Both big providers let you control this on personal accounts. Here is what each says at the time of writing, from their own pages.
Two more details worth knowing. OpenAI says a Temporary Chat in ChatGPT isn’t used to improve its models, though it may be kept for up to 30 days for safety checks. Anthropic says that if you allow training on a personal Claude account, your data can be kept for up to five years, and if you don’t, the usual period is 30 days. It also says a conversation you delete won’t be used for future training.
Policies do change, and the wording in each app can move around. So treat this as your starting point, then open your own account and look. It takes two minutes.
Free, paid or business
Not automatically, and this is where a lot of people get caught out. The IONOS survey found a quarter of UK small businesses would only use free AI tools. That is fine, as long as you know what you have agreed to. But paying for a personal plan doesn’t on its own change the training setting. You still need to check it.
The real difference is between personal and business accounts. Business plans are set up for companies handling customer information and, from what both providers say, are treated differently by default. If you have staff using AI, or you handle a lot of client detail, a business plan is worth pricing up. If it is just you, a personal plan with the right settings is a sensible start.
Paying for it? Still check your settings
The risk isn’t the AI. It’s pasting things in without knowing which settings you’ve agreed to.
Whatever your settings
Whatever your settings, some things should stay out of any AI tool. You can still get help with tricky client work, as long as you leave out anything that would identify the person.
Try this today
Here is how that looks in practice. Copy this prompt, fill in the gaps, and the AI writes your follow up without ever knowing who the client is.
You add the real name when you paste the draft into your own email. The AI never needs to know it.
I’m a [your type of business]. I need to write a follow up email to a client. I’ll call them Client A. They run a small [type of business], we met last week to talk about [the topic], and they agreed to [what was decided].
Write a warm, short follow up email in plain English that confirms what we agreed and suggests a next step. Don’t invent any details I haven’t given you.
Connecting your email and CRM
When you connect an AI tool to your own email, calendar or CRM (the system where you keep track of customers and enquiries), it works inside your own account. It isn’t shared with other users of that AI. I connect Claude to my email, my CRM and Zoom, and it can find every past conversation with a type of contact in about 30 seconds. Nobody else can see those conversations because of that connection.
So the same rule applies: choose the provider you trust, read its settings, and only connect what the job needs. Not every tool connects to AI anyway. Where one doesn’t, you can usually export the information as a spreadsheet and give the AI only the columns it needs, which is another good way to keep control.
If you are thinking about a CRM for the first time, our course Never Lose Another Enquiry (coming soon) covers setting one up and connecting AI to it properly.
Use AI with confidence, not crossed fingers
In the Pink Elephant AI Marketing Academy, every course shows you which settings to check before you start. We never see or store what you put into your AI. The full Academy opens on 14 November.
Safety isn’t only about data
The IONOS survey found 49% of owners worry about AI giving unreliable or made up answers, and they are right to. When AI drafts my course material overnight, I check everything in the morning, because it sometimes states things that aren’t true or that I never said.
That habit protects your reputation as much as any setting.
AI drafts, a person decides.
Ten minutes and you’re set
Work through these in order before you start using AI for your business.
Once that is done, the next step is giving your AI the right information so it is genuinely useful. The Your AI Marketing Brain course shows you how to build one place that holds what your AI needs to know about your business, and nothing it doesn’t. It lives in your own AI account, and you keep it for good.
Your questions answered
The questions I’m asked most about keeping business information safe in AI.
On personal ChatGPT accounts, including the free and paid personal plans, OpenAI says sharing your conversations to improve its models is switched on by default, and you can turn it off in your data controls. OpenAI says it does not train on content from its Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces by default. Check your own setting, as policies can change.
On personal Claude accounts (Free, Pro and Max), Anthropic asks you to choose whether your chats can be used to improve Claude, and you can change that choice at any time in your privacy settings. Its Team and Enterprise plans and its API are covered by separate commercial terms and are not part of that setting.
Not automatically. A paid personal plan gives you more features, but the setting that decides whether your chats help train the model still needs checking. Business plans from both providers are handled differently by default. Whatever you pay, check the data settings before you start.
No. We never see or store what you put into your AI. It stays in your own AI account, covered by that provider’s privacy policy, and every Academy course shows you which settings to check first.
Card numbers, bank details, passwords and login codes, and sensitive details about named clients or staff. If AI needs a client’s situation to help you, describe it without the name or anything that identifies them.
Where to start
Every course in the Pink Elephant AI Marketing Academy shows you the settings to check first, then helps you build an AI that knows your business.
We never see or store what you put into your AI. It stays in your own AI account, covered by that provider’s privacy policy.
A free start, then step by step to your own AI marketing team. The first course, How Marketing Really Works, is free.
Want to talk it through first?
My private 1:1 marketing sessions are worth £150 an hour, and your first hour is free. We’ll look at the AI tools you use, check your settings together and agree what’s safe to connect.
Pink Elephant AI Marketing Academy
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