// FEATURE //

WHEN BUILDING AN AI TOOL INTO YOUR OWN SYSTEMS OR NETWORK, IT IS IMPORTANT TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN USABLE FILES AND DATA THAT IS OFF LIMITS.

spending the first £ 75,000 on fixing my data first. Only with proper data quality, security, compliance and governance can you be in a strong position to actually benefit from what you build next. Without it, risk creeps in. And in the case of AI, that risk can escalate at speed and scale.

In worst case scenarios, AI gone rogue or wrong can turn the lights off to a business almost overnight. It might be that it causes a compliance breach, with extensive regulatory fines that are too significant to swallow. It might be that the AI causes reputational damages, which could be even more financially fatal.

Either way, the root cause of such crises will usually stem from the fact that no guardrails were put in to control what data AI could see, use or reference in the first place.

Data classification is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have

When building an AI tool into your own systems or network, it is important to distinguish between usable files and data that is off limits.

Think about how much information your organisation will have accumulated over the years, in old SharePoint folders nobody uses any more, to forgotten documents and memos that were made for internal eyes only. Every company has some version of this. None of it is inherently dangerous while it sits dormant and unseen. However, it becomes a genuine risk the moment an AI system is given broad access and starts drawing on it without understanding what it’ s looking at.

26 Intelligent SME. tech