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Five questions to ask your lawyer, accountant and property manager
Your own AI tools are only half of it. If your lawyer’s email is compromised, or your accountant’s meeting recorder keeps your financials for longer than anyone realised, that is your exposure and not theirs – and you will find out about it after the money has gone.
These are five questions worth asking the professionals who hold your information. You are not auditing anyone. You are finding out whether they know.
1. Does the AI tool you use train on our information by default – and have you turned that off?
A good answer names the tool and the setting. Most consumer tiers of most AI products train on what you put in unless someone switches it off, and the switch is usually three clicks deep. A poor answer is ‘no, it’s secure’, which is an answer to a different question.
2. Are the AI companies behind it also barred from training on it?
This is a different question from the first one and it catches people out. A tool can genuinely promise that it does not train on your data while the model provider underneath it has its own terms. Both need to be true.
3. How long is our information kept, and can you get it deleted if we ask?
A good answer is a number of days, or an honest ‘the provider doesn’t publish that’. The honest version is genuinely fine. A poor answer is ‘it’s deleted when you close the account’, which is not a retention policy.
4. Is zero data retention available on the plan you’re actually on?
The strongest protections in most AI products exist only on enterprise plans. Ask which plan they are on, not whether the product offers it.
5. Where is it processed, and has the vendor had a breach?
Most of these tools process in the United States. That is not disqualifying, but you should know it – and a professional who cannot tell you which tools they use has not thought about the question yet.
What to do with the answers
Very few professionals will have all five to hand, and that is not a scandal – it is what the whole market looks like right now. The one that matters is whether they can find out. A firm that comes back within a week with real answers is managing this. A firm that treats the question as an insult is telling you something.
We publish what 29 AI tools do with data, with the date we last checked each one. If your professional names a tool, you can look it up in the vendor directory.