You found out by accident. AI is already in your business.

You found out almost by accident. Someone on your team has been running client emails through ChatGPT for months. You didn't know. You don't know what they pasted into it, whether a client got something a little off-brand, whether a private detail ended up in a prompt on a server you've never heard of.

And it isn't just them. Two other people are using it too, each their own way, none of it written down anywhere.

Here's the part that's hard to sit with. Some of it is probably saving real time. Some of it is probably a quiet problem. Both are true at once, and you can't tell which is which, because you can't see the shape of any of it.

The instinct is to read this as an AI problem you're behind on. It's the opposite. You don't have too little AI in the building. You have AI with no ground rules. It came in through your people, one at a time, with no decision and no operating model, and now it's just running in the fog.

So you reach for one of two moves. Ban it, and you kill the real value your team already found on their own. Roll it out properly, and you add more of the same fog with a project plan stapled to it. The move that actually works is neither. You give the team one shared foundation: the same context, the same rules, the same way of working, so three versions become one you can finally see.

You don't have to become the AI police for this. You don't have to hire someone to audit everyone's chat history. You start by making the invisible visible, then you keep what's worth keeping.

Here's the first step, and you can do it this week. In your next standup, ask one question:

What are you each using AI for right now, and what are you pasting into it?

Just get the list. You can't govern what you can't see, and that list is the first time you'll see it.

That list is the start. The real fix is turning it into one shared way your whole team works from, standardized enough that you can actually trust it. That's what we're building, and you can be first in line.