Don't Forget Security When Using AI

Welcome back to another episode of Cappuccino Chat. This time we're talking about security when it comes to C-Pilot or other AI platforms. All right. This time we're talking about security when using Microsoft Copilot or any other AI platform for that case. So in my previous article uh should you consider using Microsoft Copilot AI? I mentioned security often being the deciding factor um and how that would play out. Well, here here's that article. So, first, security is absolutely the top priority when considering AI platforms you're going to be using and allowed to be used inside your business. So, now some AI platforms do it better than others. Microsoft, to their credit, they've kind of thought about this a little bit. So, they've got an add-on product called Purview with that allows you to put some rules in place for compliance and security and stuff like that. Just so in the back end, it can kind of monitor what you've verbally told your users they can and can't do within the C-pilot environment because within Microsoft using Copilot, they have complete access to everything that you have set up inside Office 365 and has been loaded into Office 365. So, this is where we really want to concentrate on when it comes to some of the security. Now, this I'm going to be picking on Microsoft Copilot for this one, but it's the same for any and all of the um AI platforms. It has complete access to any data you allow the user and the AI platform itself to have access to. Now, what do you think the number one question that employees ask when they're giving access to some of these AI platforms and and they want to do something? I'll let you think about that for a second and you probably won't guess it unless you read my article already, but what they ask first is what is the owner or this employee making salary? It's not how they complete a certain task or hey, help me do this or help me do that. it's they want to know what somebody else in the company is making. So that's why we've got to be careful about what data is shared. Not only shared, but in the case of Microsoft Copilot, how user security is set up in the first place. For instance, if there's a finance department, right, we want to make sure we set up guide rails because any data underneath the finance department that's been loaded in used within those in that department shouldn't be accessible to those outside that security role, if you will, or that department. So going back to that number one question, people in finance may have access to that information because it's in the budget. It's in different stuff. But if somebody who is not in finance asked that question, Microsoft Copilot wouldn't be able to query that data to pull it back. So you've got to be very careful about what's shared and how it's set up. We got to set up some guide rails. So you might be thinking that would never happen to your company. But again, if somebody in finance asks the AI to help them with next year's budget or to audit the budget, it will be able to do it because the AI is going to be able to say, "Sure, just upload the data or let me look through the files I have access to and let me gather that information." It'll take last year's budget. You'll say, "Hey, put 5% on everything and show me what that looks like and let's adjust for this and adjust for that." And it'll go ahead and do that. But now if we don't have these guide rails in place, everyone in the company can get access to that data. So we've got to make sure again when it comes to security, we set this stuff up. Now another example might just be user in finance asking for help creating graphs and dashboards for a set of spreadsheets. Again, using that budget or anything like that, once you ask the AI to help with those files, it's now available to anybody who has those permissions. So that's how easy it is for some of this data to get leaked even within your own company. So we've got to be careful. The sharing of information now is not a bad thing. It's just something that we need to address. We still find it today um on servers. You know, if you look at some of your server shares, people share stuff in the wrong place, in the wrong folder all the time. Um and that allows for people who probably shouldn't have access to certain things to be able to see those things. So, it's no different. We've just got to think of the AI the same way is we want to make sure that those file permissions, folder permissions are set up properly and we don't just, you know, willy-nilly give it access to everything just to make our lives easier, or so we think. So, now again, I've been picking on Microsoft Copilot, but these concerns are the same for all the other ones. Chat GPT, OpenAI, Claude. Um, they all often offer some type of security, but it's up to you to set it up. It's it's not configured by default in any of the AI models. So, you need to know what it is that you want when you do this. Now, with some of the other ones, it's not as easy to set up and configure because it's not looking at your whole company as a whole. and any other security stuff that you might already have set up within Office 365 is there for co-pilot whereas Chat GPT, OpenAI, Claw, those you kind of need to figure all that out yourself and set it all up by scratch. So, we need to be very careful in what we do. Think about the security aspects of it, but AI is going to save you a ton of time. Been using it ourselves here for on our marketing side and just doing some different stuff and it is phenomenal on what this stuff can do. Again, it's going to elevate the um ability for your employees to be able to do certain tasks that maybe they didn't know how to do in the past or it took forever to do when they're going through stuff like comparing spreadsheets one over the other. It's a manual process. Now, you can just tell the AI to compare these two files and give you um an exe executive dis um summary of the differences between the two. So it's much easier then to see that and then report on it or take this spreadsheet and create a PowerPoint presentation for me based on X Y and Z. Right? All these things that would take users a lot of time is going to be now much faster, much simpler and they don't need to know how to necessarily move data between programs and do different things. It's definitely something we want to look at. Just got to look at the security piece. I know I beat it up all the time on security, but it's very very important. We don't want the wrong data getting out to the wrong employees or even out to the rest of the world. So if you're thinking about setting up AI inside your business or allowing it or you want to talk more specifically on co-pilot or any of them, please reach out as always to 760-770-5200.