If you have not decided how your team should use AI, your team has probably decided for you.
Someone in sales is drafting follow-ups in a personal chatbot account. Someone in operations pastes supplier emails in to summarise them. Someone in marketing is generating captions on their phone at night. None of them asked, because nobody told them they could, and nobody told them they could not.
This is not a guess about your company in particular. In Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index, a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets, 75% said they use generative AI at work, and 78% of those users said they bring their own AI tools rather than ones their company provides. The same survey found that 52% of people using AI at work are reluctant to admit using it for their most important tasks, and only 39% had received AI training from their company.
That survey is from 2024, and the tools have spread since. The pattern it describes is what matters: people are already using AI, quietly, on their own terms, without guidance.
Why quiet use is a problem
The problem is not that people use AI. That is good news: they found something that helps. The problem is what happens when nobody is steering.
- Your data leaves without anyone noticing. Client details, prices, contracts and internal numbers get pasted into personal accounts whose settings nobody at the company has checked.
- Quality is invisible. Some people use it well and some badly, and you cannot tell which, because nobody admits to using it.
- Good ideas stay private. The person who found a way to save three hours a week keeps it to themselves, because sharing it means admitting they use AI.
- You pay twice. Individuals pay for their own subscriptions while the company pays for tools nobody uses.
Banning it rarely works. The use simply goes further underground, and you lose the little visibility you had.
Make it official in four moves
The fix is lighter than most owners expect. It does not need a committee or a thick policy. It needs four decisions, written down and shared.
1. Say yes, out loud
Start by telling the team that using AI for their work is welcome. This one sentence changes the culture more than anything else in this article. People stop hiding, which means you can finally see what is happening and help.
2. Draw the few lines that matter
Keep it to one page. Most businesses need only three lists:
- Fine without asking: drafting, summarising, brainstorming, rewriting your own text, research on public information.
- Never: pasting client personal data, passwords, contracts, financial details or anything confidential into tools the company has not approved. Sending AI output to a client without a person reading it first.
- Ask first: anything new that touches customers directly, or any new tool that connects to company accounts.
Short rules get followed. Long policies get ignored.
3. Choose the tools, and pay for them
If the company does not provide a tool, people will use whatever is free on their phone. Pick one or two approved tools, check their data settings, and give people access with work accounts. It is usually cheaper than the risk it removes, and it means the company, not an individual, controls what happens to the information.
4. Make sharing a habit
Set up a short, regular moment where people show what worked: fifteen minutes in an existing weekly meeting is enough. One person shows a prompt, a shortcut, a before and after. Keep a shared page of the ones that worked.
This is where adoption actually grows. People learn far more from a colleague doing their own job with AI than from any general training, because the example is already relevant.
Train the habit, not the tool
When companies do invest in training, it often goes to a specific product: where the buttons are, what the features do. Those details change every few months.
What lasts is the habit of thinking with these tools: writing a clear brief, giving examples, checking the output with a critical eye, knowing which tasks to hand over and which to keep. A team that has that habit adapts to every new tool in days. A team trained only on buttons starts over each time.
Where to start this week
- Ask. Anonymously if needed: who uses AI for work, for what, with which tools. The answers will surprise you.
- Write the one page. The three lists above, and the approved tools.
- Announce it as a yes, not a warning.
- Book the fifteen minutes in next week's meeting and ask one person to show something.
None of this requires a project or a budget line to begin. It requires deciding that AI use in your business is something you manage in the open instead of something that happens in private.
Your team has already started. The question is whether they carry on alone, or with you.
If you would like help writing that one page, or running a first session with your team, you can book a call at cal.michelbaakliny.com.
