Policy

AI Policy for Australian Business: What to Put in It

Your team is already using AI — the question is whether they're doing it safely. What a practical, one-page AI use policy should cover for an Australian business, without the legalese.

Aidan Lambert Updated August 2026 5 min read

The people in your business are already using AI tools — the only question is whether they are doing it safely. Left unmanaged, you end up with a handful of different habits, a few quietly risky ones, and no shared sense of what is okay. A short AI use policy fixes that, and it does not need to be a legal document to work.

What an AI policy is actually for

An AI use policy is not about restricting your team; it is about letting them use these tools confidently without creating a problem. Its whole job is to answer three questions everyone is quietly asking: what is fine to put in, what is not, and who is responsible for what comes out. Get those answered clearly and people stop either avoiding the tools out of caution or using them recklessly — both of which cost you. It is a permission slip with guardrails, not a ban.

What it should cover

A useful policy is short and specific. The essentials:

What data must stay out of public tools. Client-identifying details, confidential records, anything personal about a real person. This is the single most important line, because it is where the privacy risk lives.
Which tools are approved, and whether there is a preferred option that keeps data in your own environment for sensitive work.
Human review. Anything that goes to a client, or that carries legal, financial or reputational weight, gets checked by a person before it leaves. AI drafts; a human signs off.
Accuracy. A plain reminder that these tools can be confidently wrong, so nothing it states as fact goes out unverified.
Who to ask. One named person to raise questions with, so an unsure employee has somewhere to go other than guessing.

Keep it to one page

The best AI policy is the one people actually read, which means it is short. A single page of plain English beats a ten-page document that sits unread in a shared drive. Resist the urge to cover every hypothetical — you are aiming for the eighty per cent of situations that come up weekly, not an exhaustive legal treatment. If your business handles genuinely sensitive information or sits in a regulated field, have the wording reviewed by someone qualified; for most businesses, a clear one-pager is the right size.

Rolling it out

A policy nobody has read is not a policy. Introduce it alongside a short, practical session on using the tools well, so the rules land in context rather than as an email nobody opens — the two belong together, which is why we cover the policy in using ChatGPT in an Australian business and the training in how to train your team on AI. Set it, explain the why once, and revisit it as the tools change. That is the whole job: clear rules, understood in context, kept current.