Verona AI
Toolbox Talks is a short series of practical guides to the AI tools most businesses already have access to. Each post covers three things: how to get real value from the tool, what to watch out for, and how to keep your business data safe.
They're written for owners, managers and teams in small and mid-sized UK businesses. You don't need a technical background. Features and plan names change often, so check the provider's own pages before you roll anything out.
How to use it well
- Draft first versions: emails, proposals, job adverts, policies and social posts. Give it your audience, tone and main points, then edit the result.
- Summarise long material: paste in a report or meeting notes (with sensitive details removed) and ask for the main points, actions and risks.
- Brainstorm and plan: campaign ideas, project plans, interview questions, agendas.
- Analyse data: upload a spreadsheet and ask for trends, charts or anomalies. Then spot-check the numbers yourself.
- Build reusable assistants: custom GPTs (on paid plans) can hold your brand voice or standard processes, so your team gets consistent results.
Tip: the more context you give, the better the output. Say who it's for, what good looks like, and paste an example if you have one.
What to watch out for
- Confident mistakes: it can invent facts, figures, quotes and sources. Check anything you'll publish or act on.
- Out-of-date answers: unless it's searching the web, its knowledge has a cutoff date.
- Generic output: without your context, everything sounds the same. Customers notice.
- Copyright and ownership: check the terms before using generated content commercially, and don't paste in other people's copyrighted work to rewrite it.
- Over-reliance: keep a human responsible for every decision, especially in HR, legal and finance.
How to avoid security issues
- Know your plan: on free and personal plans, conversations may be used to train models unless you turn this off in settings. Business plans (Team, Enterprise) exclude business data from training by default and add admin controls.
- Never paste sensitive data: customer personal data, passwords, API keys, financial records, contracts or anything under NDA.
- Anonymise first: replace names, emails and account numbers with placeholders before pasting.
- Turn on two-factor authentication for every account, and use company accounts rather than personal ones.
- Watch shared links: shared chats can be viewed by anyone with the link. Delete ones you no longer need.
- Be careful with plugins, GPTs and connectors: third-party GPTs and connected apps can see what you send them. Only use ones from sources you trust.
- Write a simple AI policy: list what staff can and can't put into AI tools, and which accounts they should use.
Want this as a session for your team?
We run AI training on site, half a day or a full day, from what AI actually is to using it safely with customer data.
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