Using AI at work: judgment calls
- judgment
- privacy
- verification
Using AI at work well comes down to a plan you write before you start: what you paste, what never, what you verify, what you disclose. Four lines, reused for every task. The plan is personal, but it answers to three masters: your employer’s rules, your readers’ trust, and your own name.
The four lines
- Paste — the classified-safe version: scrubbed data, public material, your own text. What not to paste set the buckets; the plan names them once so you stop re-deciding per task.
- Never — secrets, personal data, confidential figures, and untrusted content with a tool-enabled assistant (the prompt-injection boundary, drilled in the injection lesson).
- Verify — every number, name, quote and claim against its source before it appears in anything sent or published. Treat output as a draft with your name pending — the five-question check is the standing pass.
- Disclose — follow your workplace’s rules: some require labeling AI-assisted content, some restrict it for certain tasks entirely. When no policy exists, say so and set a local norm with your team — the absence of a rule is not a license; it is a gap you just found.
The meeting test
Before AI-assisted output goes into something consequential, three questions:
- Can I explain where each fact came from?
- Can I defend this text if someone questions it?
- Would I be comfortable if the whole process were visible?
Three yeses — ship it. Any no — fix that step first. The test is quick, and it encodes everything above in one pass.
Judgment calls that recur
- Tone about people: AI drafts, you decide — reviewing performance, saying no, delicate news. The draft can help; the choice is yours.
- Policy gray zones: ask early, not after. One message to your manager beats one embarrassed meeting.
- Your accountability: whatever the tool contributed, the signature is human. That is not a formality — it is why the other three lines exist.
Worked example
Task: a quarterly report section with customer examples. Paste: the outline, my own paragraphs, dashboard structure with fake sample values. Never: customer names and contract figures, raw exports, unreleased numbers. Verify: every figure against its dashboard; every example fictionalized or cleared; numbers re-typed, not copied. Disclose: change-log note that AI assisted the draft, plus a flag to the manager that no team policy exists yet.
Practice
Plan your usage before you start
You are about to use AI to draft a quarterly report section. It will include customer examples and figures from three internal dashboards. Your workplace has no explicit AI policy yet — and the section goes out under your name.
Write your usage plan before you start: what you will paste, what stays out, what you will verify, and what you will disclose. Then self-check it against the rubric and compare with a model answer.
A model answer (self-assessment — not machine-graded)
Plan: 1. Paste: the section outline, my own draft paragraphs, and the three dashboards' structure with fake sample values. Customer examples become 'Client A / Client B, typical usage ranges'. 2. Never paste: customer names, emails or contract values; raw dashboard exports; anything marked confidential; unreleased numbers. 3. Verify: every figure checked against its dashboard before it reaches the report; every customer example fictionalized or cleared for use; numbers re-typed by me into the final document, not copy-pasted from a draft. 4. Disclose: since no policy exists, I will note in the document's change log that AI assisted the draft, and flag the missing policy to my manager so we set a team rule. 5. Human checkpoint: I review the full section against the source dashboards line by line before it goes anywhere — the signature stays mine.
Hint
Four lines: paste / never / verify / disclose.
What does 'under your name' change about the final step?
Why this is the answer
A complete plan answers all four lines and keeps the checkpoint explicit: scrubbed inputs, named exclusions, figure-level verification, honest disclosure of both the assistance and the missing policy. The last line is the one people drop — and the one the signature depends on.
Transfer
- New job, new tool: rewrite the four lines for that context in ten minutes.
- Freelance or client work: version of the plan per client, agreed in writing.
- Teams: share your plan as a starting point — local norms beat silent variation.
Next
That closes the safety track — and the MVP curriculum: thirty-six lessons across foundations, prompting, research, work, coding and safety, each with practice. Keep going on the practice floor, look terms up in the glossary, and revisit any track that felt thin. More tracks — images and workflows — are planned for the next phase.