AI can help employees be more efficient and productive, but it also involves some risk to your company’s cybersecurity. Like any new technology, the successful adoption of AI requires employee communications that provide guardrails for both ease of use and reduction of human error.
Here are five dos and don’ts you might want to include in your AI adoption communications:
Emphasize the need for human oversight with AI. Employees can be lulled into accepting everything AI dishes up, but we know there will be anomalies and inaccuracies. AI bias can result in distorted or discriminatory outcomes. Hallucinations could stem from AI recognizing a pattern rather than determining a truth. Teach employees to be skeptical.
Employees need to be highly aware of the risks of sharing sensitive data. Inputting customer records, employee info, company financial data or even internal emails can cause tremendous security issues and even put the company at legal risk. Employees may not realize the full implications of sharing the data they’re working with every day in their job roles.
If employees are using AI in their personal lives, and of course many of them are, they may use those same platforms for work tasks, bypassing IT’s security policies without even thinking about it. If your IT department has vetted third-party or vendor AI tools, let employees know which ones are approved for use at work. And importantly, which ones aren’t.
Some sources say up to 90% of technology professionals are using AI to develop code. But most professional developers know to be cautious about trusting that code. AI could introduce malicious code and may also be missing some context in terms of internal architecture or knowledge of the company. Remind employees that AI can’t replace their smarts.
It’s not enough for the company to set policies for employee use of AI. That policy needs to be communicated over the long term to employees, preferably with concrete examples of the many ways they may misuse AI without meaning to. A strong internal communications campaign can bring those policies to life for employees, so they will apply them to their daily work.
