Write Your Team's AI Rules in an Afternoon · Lesson 5 of 7

Agents, note-takers, hiring tools and odd requests

25 minutes. Four short rules for the situations that catch people out.

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The first four lessons cover how most people use AI today: typing into a chat. This lesson covers four situations that are newer, or easier to get wrong. Each one becomes a few lines in your policy.

More AI tools can now *do* things, not just write things. They can read your inbox, add a calendar event, update a customer record, fill in a web form or work through a task while you're doing something else. These are often called agents.

The rule is the same one you'd use for a new employee with a set of keys. Sort every action into three columns:

| May do alone | Only with a person's OK, every time | Never on its own | |---|---|---| | Search and read | Send an email or message outside the company | Send money, pay a bill or issue a refund | | Summarize and draft | Create or change a calendar event with outside people | Delete records, files or email | | Look things up | Create or change records in a business system | Change passwords, bank details or payroll | | | Fill in and submit a form | Change who can see or share a file |

Send, pay and delete stay with a person. Most assistants show an approval prompt before they act. Teach your team to read it (who, what, how much) and never to click "always allow" on anything in the right two columns.

Two more lines worth adding:

• An agent uses the account that connected it. Connect it with the most limited account that still does the job, never an owner or admin login.
• If an agent wants to do something you didn't ask for, stop it. Emails, web pages and documents can contain hidden instructions aimed at AI tools. An unexpected "send this" or "share that" is a reason to deny and tell someone.

The course Connect Your AI to Your Business Tools goes much deeper on this, with a full permission worksheet.

Note-takers that join video calls, record, transcribe and send a summary are everywhere, and many are built into meeting tools you already use. They're useful. They're also recording someone who may not expect it.

Your rule:

> No AI note-taker or recorder joins a call with a customer, supplier or job candidate unless everyone has been told at the start, and anyone can say no.

Then add:

• Say it out loud, and put it in the invite. "We use an AI note-taker so we don't miss anything. Is that OK?"
• Turn it off if anyone hesitates. Take notes by hand instead.
• Only approved note-takers. A personal note-taker app on a customer call sends that call to an account the company doesn't control.
• Keep recordings only as long as you need them. Decide how long (30 days is a common choice) and who deletes them.
• Check the summary before sending it to anyone. It's AI-made text going out, so Lesson 4's rule applies.

Recording laws differ from state to state, and some require everyone on a call to agree. Telling everyone and getting a yes keeps you on the safe side wherever the other person is.

Some hiring tools now screen resumes, rank applicants or run AI interviews and produce a score. A tool like this makes a decision about a person's livelihood, and the business that uses it is the one answering for who got turned away.

Your rule:

> We only use a hiring tool that scores or ranks people if we can explain how it reached the score, and a person makes every final decision.

Before using one, ask the vendor:

• Show me the scoring for a sample candidate. What did it look at? What did it ignore?
• How does a person review or override a score?
• What do you tell candidates about the AI's role?

If they can't answer clearly, skip it for now. Some states and cities have rules about automated hiring tools, and more are coming, so if you hire often, ask an employment lawyer what applies to you.

And the simplest line of all: never paste a candidate's resume into a personal AI account. It's an employee-file item on your never-paste list.

AI has made fake requests much better. A scam email can now have perfect grammar, a believable back story, a forwarded thread and an invoice that looks real. A voice on the phone can sound like someone you know. In September 2026, Microsoft described a campaign that sent more than a million fake-CEO emails asking accounts payable staff for payments of nearly $50,000 each, with signs the templates were built with AI.

Polish no longer means it's real. So your rule doesn't depend on spotting a fake:

> Any request to pay someone new, change bank or payment details, send money urgently, buy gift cards, or send employee or customer data gets a call back first, to a phone number we already had. Not the number in the email.

Make it easy to follow:

• It applies to everyone, including the owner. If the owner's email asks for a wire, the bookkeeper calls the owner. Say out loud that the owner will never be annoyed by that call.
• Urgency is a warning sign, not a reason to skip the call.
• Write down the call: who you called, when, at what number.

• Open the Staff AI Policy template.
• Section 5, AI that takes actions: fill in the three columns. Start from the table above and adjust it to your tools.
• Section 6, Note-takers and recordings: keep the rule, name the approved note-taker (or write "none approved"), and set how long recordings are kept.
• Section 7, Hiring tools: keep the rule. If you use a hiring tool today, write its name and whether it passes the three vendor questions.
• Section 8, The call-back rule: keep the rule, and list the kinds of request it covers for your business.

Tell the person who pays your bills about the call-back rule today, in person or by phone. Ask them to write down the numbers they'd use to call back your top five suppliers and you.

• Sections 5 to 8 of your policy are filled in.
• Send, pay and delete are in the "never on its own" or "only with a person's OK" columns.
• The note-taker rule says customers are told and can say no.
• The person who pays your bills knows the call-back rule and has the numbers.

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