What happens to company data when your communications team uses ChatGPT?

This article is not anti-ChatGPT. It's written for those who already use it or are considering it – and who should know what it means from a data privacy perspective.

It happens every day

A communications manager opens a browser, pastes a draft press release into ChatGPT, and asks for a summary. Or a copywriter feeds in a client brief and asks for three headline options. Or the CEO speaks out loud the key points of the communications strategy and asks the AI to build a presentation outline from them.

Each of these is an ordinary, useful, efficient action. And each one transfers information outside the organization in a way that no one has explicitly approved.

What actually happens when you type text into ChatGPT?

There's no conspiracy here. OpenAI discloses its practices in its terms of service. The problem is that few people read them – and even fewer think about what they mean for their organization's data privacy.

In the consumer version (free and Plus), OpenAI's terms allow input data to be used for model development, unless the user explicitly opts out in settings. In many organizations, no one has ever gone in to change that setting.

In practice, this can mean:

• An unpublished press release may end up as part of the model's training data

• Details from a client brief travel to third-party servers

• An internal communications strategy is written out in a tool whose privacy practices have not been assessed

• No one in the organization knows who used what and with which data

This doesn't mean ChatGPT is a dangerous tool. It means that the consumer version is not designed with organizational security requirements in mind.

GDPR enters the picture sooner than you'd think

In many organizations, the communications team doesn't think of itself as a processor of personal data. But the moment a name, title, email address, or identifiable role appears in a message or draft, you're in the realm of personal data processing.

GDPR requires that you know: where personal data is being processed, who is processing it, on what legal basis, and how long the data is retained.

When a communications team uses consumer AI without organizational approval and assessment, the answers to those questions are: unknown, unknown, not assessed, unknown. That is not an acceptable situation – neither legally nor from the organization's own risk management perspective.

Is ChatGPT Teams or Enterprise the solution?

Yes, partially. OpenAI offers enterprise versions with training use disabled by default and stricter data privacy terms. The same applies to Anthropic's and Google's enterprise offerings.

But an enterprise licence only solves part of the problem. It doesn't solve:

• The fact that work still happens in individual chat windows with no version history, approval process, or audit trail

• The fact that no one has an overview of what the team is doing, with what data, and to what ends

• The fact that AI-assisted content doesn't stay in the organization's memory – it disappears when the browser window closes

An enterprise licence makes the tool more compliant. It doesn't make it a communications management system.

What does a purpose-built tool do differently?

Lyyli was built from the ground up with organizational communications security and compliance requirements in mind.

Data stays with your organization

Lyyli uses Anthropic's, OpenAI's, and Google's enterprise APIs – not consumer versions. Customer content is not used to train models. Content doesn't reach third parties.

Access control is built in

Role-based access control, workspace sharing, and user roles are not add-on features – they are the core of the product. You know who has access to what.

Audit trail shows what happened

All content-related changes and approvals leave a trace. No more situations where no one knows who did what and when.

Approval process is part of the workflow

Content goes through a structured approval process before publishing. The right people approve the right content – not via a Slack message, not via an email chain.

GDPR practices are up to date

Our privacy practices, data processing agreements, and controller obligations are available at lyyli.ai/legal.

Three questions worth pausing to consider

If your communications team uses or is starting to use AI, pause for a moment:

Do we know what data our team is feeding into AI tools? If the answer is "not exactly", that's the first thing worth finding out.

Has the tool we're using been assessed against our organization's data privacy requirements? IT or legal can assess this if asked. Often they're not asked.

Does AI-assisted work stay in the organization's memory? Results, versions, approvals, changes – or does everything disappear with the browser window?

These don't require alarm or urgency. But they're worth knowing.

Finally

AI in communications is not a risk to be avoided. It's a tool that needs to be adopted in a controlled way.

The difference between consumer AI and a purpose-built organizational tool is not which one produces better texts. It's which one builds trust with customers, staff, and regulators while the work gets done.

Further reading on security

Interested in ISO 27001 certification and what it means in practice for a B2B SaaS company? Read: ISO 27001 and B2B SaaS: Why security certification wins deals

A deeper look at Lyyli's security architecture for IT departments: Cybersecurity and Privacy in Lyyli.ai. All security and compliance solutions summarized on our Trust page.