Client Documents in AI Tools: A Checklist for Agencies
You can put client documents into an AI tool, but only after you know where the text goes, how long it is kept, whether it trains a model, who else processes it, and what your contract with the client allows. Those five answers differ a lot between a personal chat account and a business product bui
Posted on Oct 23 • Originally published at discoveryphaseai.com • AI-assisted
You can put client documents into an AI tool, but only after you know where the text goes, how long it is kept, whether it trains a model, who else processes it, and what your contract with the client allows. Those five answers differ a lot between a personal chat account and a business product built on a commercial API. The checklist below works for any vendor, and the last section shows how Discovery Phase AI answers it.
This is a practical checklist, not legal advice. Your client contract and your own counsel decide what is allowed.
Before comparing vendors, picture the path a document takes when you upload it:
Each hop is a place where a copy can live and a party that can read it. A good vendor can tell you, for every hop, whether a copy exists, for how long, and in which country. If the answer is "we are not sure", that is your answer.
It also matters what the documents hold. Discovery material is often more sensitive than it looks: names and contact details of client staff, unreleased plans, pricing, security details of existing systems. Some of that is personal data under laws such as the GDPR, which brings its own rules.
Use this as a checklist. A vendor should answer each in writing, ideally on a public page.
The last row deserves honesty both ways. An audit report tells you a third party checked controls; a vendor without one is not automatically unsafe, but you should weigh their written answers more carefully and expect them to be specific.
These are the two questions clients ask most, and they are often confused.
Training use means your text becomes material that improves a model, which other customers then use. For confidential work you want a clear "no" by default. Policies differ by product tier at the same provider. For example, OpenAI's help centre says it does not train on inputs or outputs from its business products and API by default, while personal ChatGPT accounts have an "Improve the model for everyone" setting that is on unless the user turns it off ( OpenAI data controls FAQ ). Pasting a client deck into a personal chat account is therefore a different decision from using a business product.
Retention means how long a copy exists, even if it never trains anything. A provider may keep API inputs and outputs for a short period. Anthropic, for instance, states that it deletes API inputs and outputs on its backend within 30 days by default, with exceptions such as a different agreement, enforcing its usage policy, or legal requirements ( Anthropic privacy centre ). Check the current page on the day you decide; these terms change.
Then ask the same questions of the app on top: does it keep the original files, and does it log the text of your prompts?
If the documents include personal data and you or your client are subject to the GDPR, the AI vendor usually acts as a processor for that data, and Article 28 of the GDPR requires a written contract with it, commonly called a data processing agreement (DPA). It also requires the processor to get your authorisation before using sub-processors and to pass the same obligations down to them.
Most leaks are not caused by a vendor. Set a few rules for your own people:
These answers are taken from our security page and Privacy Policy, which describe what the product does today:
Plan details, including which features each plan has, are on the pricing page.
I build Discovery Phase AI, a tool aimed at the writing-and-assembling side of discovery: it drafts the early stages from the decks, documents and call transcripts you already have, and exports one report. Your team still runs the interviews, reviews every draft and makes the decisions.
If you just want to see what a finished discovery looks like, here is a complete sample report for an invented field-service app. No signup needed.
The original of this post is on our blog. Questions or corrections are welcome in the comments.
This post was drafted with AI assistance and edited by a human before publishing.