Your Team Is Already Sharing Customer Data with AI. Here's What That's Costing You.
91% of employees admit to sharing sensitive company information with AI tools. Most don't even realise they're putting the business at risk.
The Reality of AI Data Sharing
Every day, employees across your organisation paste customer lists, financial data, and confidential information into ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools.
They're not being careless—they're being productive. But that productivity comes with hidden costs.
The uncomfortable truth:
When you paste data into an AI chatbot, that data leaves your control. It travels to external servers. It may be stored. It could be used to train future models. And if it contains personally identifiable information, you've just created a compliance incident.
Most employees don't think twice about uploading:
- Customer contact lists for segmentation analysis
- Sales data with client names and deal values
- HR information for policy drafting
- Financial records for reporting help
- Support tickets containing customer details
Each upload is a potential breach waiting to be discovered.
The Numbers That Should Worry You
The gap between AI adoption and AI governance is where breaches happen.
What Regulators Are Saying
Australia's Privacy Act reforms have teeth. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has made clear that 'reasonable steps' to protect personal information now explicitly includes how data is shared with third-party AI services.
Key regulatory concerns:
Consent
Did customers consent to their data being processed by AI systems?
Disclosure
Have you told customers their data might be sent to overseas AI providers?
Security
Can you demonstrate adequate protection of personal information?
Data minimisation
Are you only sharing what's necessary?
A single employee uploading a customer CSV to ChatGPT could trigger violations across all four requirements.
The Business Impact Beyond Fines
Regulatory penalties are just the beginning. Data incidents create cascading business damage:
Reputation damage
Customers increasingly care about how their data is handled. A breach erodes trust that took years to build.
Customer churn
Studies show 65% of consumers lose trust in a company after a breach, with 27% discontinuing the relationship entirely.
Operational disruption
Breach response requires significant internal resources—legal review, customer notification, system audits, and remediation.
Competitive disadvantage
Enterprises increasingly require vendor security assessments. A breach history affects your ability to win contracts.
Insurance impact
Cyber insurance premiums increase substantially after incidents, and some insurers may decline coverage.
The Problem Isn't AI—It's How We Use It
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are genuinely transformative for productivity. The solution isn't to ban them—that just drives usage underground.
The solution is to make safe AI usage as easy as unsafe usage.
That's why we built Redactli.
With Redactli, your team can:
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