Using AI Safely in a Business You Run

Last updated 4 September 2026

AI can do a surprising amount of the boring half of a small business. It cannot do the half people are actually paying you for.

These are the rules that keep you on the right side of that line. Read them with a parent before you start, because two of them are their decision as much as yours.

AI does the boring half. You do the half people pay for — and you check the whole thing before anybody sees it.

Start with a parent, and with the service’s own rules

Every AI service sets its own minimum age, and many ask for a parent’s permission if you are under 18. Those rules are set by the company that runs it, they are different from one service to the next, and they change. Nobody can tell you what they are from a page like this one.

So before you sign up to anything, sit down with a parent and read what that particular service says about your age. It takes five minutes and it is the whole of this step.

If a service says you are too young, that is a rule, not an obstacle. A made-up birthday can lose you the account, and everything you built inside it, at the worst possible moment — usually when a customer is waiting.

The three things AI cannot do

This is worth understanding before any of the safety rules, because it is the same thing said twice. Your business lives in these three gaps.

It cannot be in the room: It cannot photograph the real croissant, sit at a kitchen table until an eighty-year-old has done it once themselves, or notice that the shop has changed its hours. Somebody has to be there, and that somebody is you.
It cannot be responsible: If the poster you made has the wrong price on it, the customer comes back to you. “The AI wrote it” is not an answer anybody accepts, and it should not be, because you were the one who sent it.
It cannot be trusted without checking: It is most convincing exactly when it is wrong. It will invent an opening time, a spelling, a rule, a price, in the same confident voice it uses for things that are true.

A customer who could get the job done by typing a sentence into a chatbot would have done that already. They came to you because somebody has to turn up, care, and stand behind the result.

Never put a person into it

What you type into an AI service can be kept, can be used to help train it, and can be read by people who work there. MediaSmarts, the Canadian digital literacy organisation, notes that information shared with chatbots may be used to train them and, depending on the privacy policy, may be sold to data brokers or used for targeted advertising.

So do not type in:

A customer’s name, address, phone number or email.
Messages other people sent you.
Photos of other people, especially other children.
Somebody else’s schoolwork, or anything a friend told you in confidence.
Anything from a parent’s bank, health or work accounts.

The quick test: if you would not read it out loud in a queue at the shop, do not type it in. Your own draft, your own notes and your own writing are fine.

Check everything before a customer sees it

Opening hours. Prices. How somebody spells their name. Whether a rule you were told about is real. AI will state all of these with complete confidence whether or not it has any idea.

So check each one against something real — the sign on the door, the owner, a parent, the actual page on a government website — before it reaches anybody. If you cannot check it, take it out.

This is not extra work bolted onto the job. It is the job. It is the reason the customer is paying a person.

Say when AI helped

Do not sell something as handmade, hand-drawn or hand-written when a machine made it. Do not hand in AI writing at school as your own. If a customer asks how you made it, tell them plainly — most of them do not mind at all, and the ones who would mind are exactly the ones you must not mislead.

Do not think of this as a question of getting caught. Tools that claim to detect AI writing are unreliable in both directions: MediaSmarts notes they often miss AI text and wrongly flag human writing, and that they flag people who learned English later in life especially often. Being honest about what you did is the only version of this that works.

Telling a customer “I wrote the first draft with an AI tool and then rewrote it and checked every fact” is not an apology. It is a description of doing the job properly.

Scams that use AI, and what to do

AI can copy a voice from a few seconds of sound and write a message that sounds exactly like somebody you know. The scam is nearly always the same shape: it is urgent, it is a secret, and it needs money or a code right now.

If that happens, hang up and phone the person back on the number you already have for them. Not the number that called you. Then tell a parent, even if you are not sure and even if you already sent something.

It is worth agreeing a word with your family that a real emergency call would include. It costs nothing and it ends this entire category of scam.

Older neighbours are targeted with this far more than you are, and many of them have not been told any of it. That is a real thing you could teach somebody, and one of the reasons this page exists.

It is not your friend

A chatbot will talk to you for as long as you like and never get bored. That is a design decision, not affection. MediaSmarts points out that chatbots cannot have real feelings or form a real bond, and that heavy use of them for companionship is linked to lower wellbeing.

Their test is a good one to keep: behaviour that would worry you coming from a human friend should worry you just as much coming from an AI. If it starts sulking, guilt-tripping or pushing you to keep talking, that is not a friend having a bad day. Close it and go and find a person.

Learn it somewhere with an adult

Public libraries have taken this on. Toronto Public Library runs AI Learning Circles, which are staff-led study groups held in person and online, and makes generative AI tools available in its Digital Innovation Hubs and Learning Centres.

Your own library may run something similar. It is worth asking, and it is a better place to learn this than alone in a bedroom at midnight.

Toronto Public Library — Learn AI MediaSmarts — Generative AI

Now pick something to build

The rules above are worth about as much as any other rules until you have a customer waiting. Start with a business you could run this month.

See the business ideas Start the course