If you’re running your business through a free or personal AI account, what you type into it can be kept for years, read by people who work for the AI company, or used to teach their next model. It depends on the tool and your settings. Your business also has no contract with that company, because the account belongs to you as a person. A business plan fixes most of that.
Somebody in your business pasted something sensitive into an AI tool this week. There’s a decent chance it was you.
Last month’s P&L, to ask why margin dropped. The cashflow forecast before a bank meeting. A tricky email to a staff member. Your whole pricing sheet, to sanity check a quote. All on the same account you use to plan dinner.
I’m not having a go. It’s the fastest advisor most owners have ever had. But nobody tells you the plan you’re on matters, and it does.
Personal plans and business plans are different products
Every big AI tool comes in two flavours. There are the plans you sign up for as a person. That’s the free version of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, or a paid personal plan like ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. Then there are the plans a business signs up for, usually called Team, Business or Enterprise.
They look identical when you’re typing. Same chat box, same answers. The difference is in the terms you clicked accept on, and those decide three things.
- How long the AI company keeps a copy of what you typed.
- Whether people who work for them can read it.
- Whether it’s used to train their AI. That means your conversations become part of what the next version learns from. Once that’s happened, deleting the chat doesn’t undo it.
What the big three do on personal plans
These change every few months, so have a look at the current terms before you rely on me. This is where things sat when I wrote this in October 2026.
- ChatGPT. On the free plan and Plus, OpenAI can use your chats to train its models unless you go into settings and switch it off. Temporary Chat, which doesn’t save to your history, isn’t used for training.
- Claude. On the free plan, Pro and Max, Anthropic asks each person to choose. Say yes to training and your chats are kept for five years. Say no and it’s 30 days.
- Gemini. In Google’s personal Gemini app, some chats are read by human reviewers, including outside contractors. Those chats are kept for up to three years, even if you delete your history.
Google’s own help page asks people not to type in anything confidential they wouldn’t want a reviewer to see. That’s the company telling you, in writing.
Your own numbers aren’t protected by much
Most owners think about privacy as a customer problem. Names, emails, addresses. Fair enough. But the stuff that would hurt most if it got out is often your own.
- Your financials. P&L, balance sheet, bank exports, what you owe and to whom.
- Your pricing and margins. The thing your competitors would love to see.
- Your plans. The expansion, the sale, the restructure nobody on the team knows about yet.
- Your staff. Pay, performance, a disciplinary, a medical certificate.
- Your logins. Screenshots with passwords in them, the Wi Fi code on the whiteboard behind you.
Here’s the catch. New Zealand’s Privacy Act protects information about people. Your margins and your bank balance aren’t about a person, so the Act doesn’t cover them and nobody’s checking how you handle them. The only thing standing between your P&L and a reviewer, a training run or a five year retention window is a setting you probably picked in a hurry, on your phone.
Staff details are different. They’re about a person, so the Act does apply, and you’re responsible for where they end up.
The Privacy Commissioner’s guidance on AI tools also points out that some AI tools have leaked passwords and API keys, the codes that let one piece of software log into another, after they turned up in training data. Anything you’d change a password over stays well away from a personal plan.
And the account sits on your personal email. If you ever sell the business, bring in a partner or step back, years of its thinking are somewhere the business doesn’t own.
Then there’s your team
Same risks for your staff, plus one more. Their personal account belongs to them. When they leave, every brief, customer email and pricing draft they pasted in goes with them. You can’t log in, can’t delete it and can’t ask the AI company to, because you’re not their customer.
We wrote an AI policy and staff training for a client this month. The slide after the welcome says the tools are already in use and there’s no policy yet. Nobody’s in trouble for that.
The line we make sure lands in the room is the smallest one. A customer export is off limits even if it’s three rows.
Your client contracts probably already say no
A lot of client agreements have a confidentiality clause, a promise not to share their information without permission. Most of ours do. Pasting a client’s brief into a tool that might keep it for years, and might learn from it, is sharing it with a company they never agreed to. Nobody notices. Right up until someone does.
What the Privacy Act expects
The Act has 13 rules for handling information about people. The Privacy Commissioner’s guidance applies them to AI tools, and it’s pretty plain. Check whether a tool keeps what you put in and whether it trains on it. Pick tools whose contract stops training. Before you roll one out, do a privacy impact assessment, which is a short written look at what could go wrong and what you’ll do about it. And you stay responsible for the information, whichever tool it’s sitting in.
One distinction does a lot of work here. If an AI company only processes your information to do a job for you, the law treats it a lot like you still holding it. If they use it for their own purposes, like training, it’s treated as you handing it to an overseas company, and rule 12 of the Act has a say in whether you were allowed to. On a personal plan there’s no contract between your business and the AI company saying which one it is.
What a business plan changes
Business plans sit under commercial terms, the contract a company signs with another company. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all say they don’t train on business customers’ data by default. The account belongs to the business, so you decide who’s in it.
There’s also a data processing agreement, usually called a DPA. It’s the part that says the AI company handles your information on your instructions and for your purposes. It’s the document you’d pull out of a drawer if the Privacy Commissioner, a client or your insurer ever asked.
We run our own client work in Claude on a Team plan for exactly that reason. When someone leaves, you remove their seat and the work stays with you. The extra monthly cost buys the paperwork. That’s the whole point of it.
What to do this week
- Start with your own account. Scroll back through a month of chats and count how many you’d be happy for a stranger to read.
- Ask your team which AI tools they use for work, and on which account. Make it safe to answer honestly. The list will be longer than you think.
- Move yourself, and anyone who touches client, customer or financial information, onto a business plan.
- Write down what never goes into a personal AI plan. Financials, pricing, staff matters, customer lists, health information, anything under an NDA, passwords. Keep it short and stick it where people will see it.
- Read your client agreements for confidentiality clauses, and your privacy statement for anything about how you use AI.
- Add AI accounts to your offboarding checklist, right next to the laptop and the keys.
Project 24/7, our technology studio, followed a single client file through a personal AI account step by step, if you want the detail. And if your website was built with AI too, this one’s worth a read.
If you’d like a hand working out where your business sits, that’s the kind of thing we do. It usually takes about an hour.
