Feeding it safely: what to put in, what never to

A brain is only as safe as what you put in it, and this is the lesson where a bit of care saves you real trouble. The rules here are simple and they are not scary. This is general guidance to keep you sensible, not legal advice, and if you handle a lot of personal data it is worth a proper look at your obligations.

What belongs in a brain

The good news: the things that make a brain useful are also the things that are safe. General, reusable business facts.

• Your prices, packages and terms.
• Your policies and how you run a job.
• Your voice and example messages, with any customer’s personal details stripped out.
• Your public FAQs and standard answers.

None of that is secret or personal. It is the stuff you would happily tell any customer who asked. That is a good rough test for what belongs.

What never goes in

Some things should stay well out of a brain, no matter how convenient it seems:

• Passwords, card details and bank details. A brain is a reference the AI reads, not a vault. These do not belong in one, ever.
• Customers’ personal data in bulk. A spreadsheet of names, addresses, phone numbers or anything sensitive. Do not pour your customer database in to “save typing”. That is exactly the kind of data you have a duty to look after.
• Anything confidential to someone else. A supplier’s private pricing, another firm’s documents, staff records. If it is not yours to share, it is not yours to feed in.

The one-line rule

When in doubt, leave it out.

If you would hesitate to email a fact to a stranger, do not put it in a brain. Nearly every safe decision falls out of that single question, and it keeps you on the right side of the line without needing to memorise regulations.

A word on where it lives

If you stay with the manual, paste-from-a-document version from the last lesson, your brain sits in your own files, on your own account, which keeps things simple. When you move to a more automatic setup later, the same care applies: know where the data is stored, who can reach it, and keep anything personal out of the general reference layer. We come back to how we handle this in our own setup two lessons from now.

Next: the lesson nobody warns you about, keeping the brain true once your business moves on.