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Who This AI Policy Is For
This AI acceptable use policy template is written for companies that want employees to use AI safely without turning the policy into a legal document nobody reads. It applies to employees, contractors, temporary workers, and anyone using company data, company systems, or company-approved AI tools. The policy should cover public chatbots, enterprise AI assistants, browser extensions, meeting assistants, AI writing tools, model APIs, and any other system that can generate, summarize, classify, rewrite, translate, analyze, or act on information.
Approved AI Tools
Employees may only use AI tools that have been approved by the company. Approved tools should be listed in a simple catalog that includes the tool name, approved use cases, allowed data types, owner, and support contact. If an employee wants to use a new AI tool, they should request review before uploading company data or connecting the tool to email, files, CRM, code repositories, calendars, or customer systems. This reduces shadow AI without blocking useful experimentation.
Data Employees Must Not Enter Into AI
Employees must not enter confidential or regulated data into unapproved AI tools. This includes customer personal information, employee records, health information, payment data, credentials, API keys, private source code, unreleased financials, board materials, legal matter details, M&A information, and any document marked confidential or restricted. Approved AI tools may have different rules depending on the model, workspace, department, and retention setting. When in doubt, employees should remove identifying details or use the approved governed AI environment.
Allowed Everyday Uses
Employees may use approved AI tools for low-risk tasks such as drafting internal outlines, summarizing non-sensitive notes, improving grammar, brainstorming campaign ideas, creating first drafts, translating public content, explaining general concepts, and preparing questions for a human expert. AI output should be treated as a draft, not as a final authority. Employees remain responsible for the accuracy, tone, confidentiality, and business impact of anything they send, publish, or rely on.
Human Review Rules
AI output must be reviewed by a person before it is used in customer communication, legal analysis, employment decisions, financial decisions, medical or safety-related contexts, security operations, code that will ship to production, or any external publication. Human review should check accuracy, missing context, unsupported claims, bias, tone, confidentiality, and whether the output follows company policy. AI should not be used as the sole decision-maker for consequential decisions about people, customers, money, access, safety, or legal obligations.
Enforcement and Reporting
Policy enforcement should be clear and practical. Employees should report accidental data exposure, suspicious AI output, unapproved AI tools, or AI-generated content that may create risk. The company may use technical controls such as sensitive data masking, approved tool lists, audit logs, access controls, browser controls, and policy guardrails to enforce the policy. The goal is not to punish honest mistakes. The goal is to prevent repeatable risk and give employees safer paths to do useful work.