Is it safe to connect AI to company data?
It can be, if the AI never has direct, unrestricted access. Put a governed layer in between: role-based access, masking of sensitive fields before anything reaches the model, approvals before any action, and an audit log of every question and answer. That is how Runmate is built, and it is what most IT and compliance teams ask for before they approve AI.
What to check before you approve an AI tool
- Does it check every data read, answer and action against rules, and block when a rule is missing?
- Are sensitive fields (contact details, cash and banking data) masked before they reach the AI?
- Does anything that reaches a customer or changes a system wait for approval?
- Is there an audit log of who asked what, which data was used and which rules applied?
- Is each company's data isolated, and is that tested?
- Does the AI provider train on your data?
How Runmate answers those questions
- Guardrails are checked at five points: the request, each data read, each AI call, each answer and each action. An unknown or failed check blocks and explains why.
- Roles decide which fields are visible, masked or hidden. Masking happens before data reaches the AI.
- Actions are prepared first and wait in Approvals. Messages to people outside the company always need approval.
- Every question, answer, run and action is written to an append-only, tamper-evident audit log.
- Each company's data is isolated at the database level, and an automated test proves it on every change.
- Runmate uses AI providers that do not train on your data.
Regulated industries
Healthcare (HIPAA) support is on the roadmap: a host and AI provider that sign a BAA, and an external security assessment. Until then, Runmate is not used for protected health information.
Common questions
- Does the AI see customer emails and phone numbers?
- Only if the person's role is allowed to see them. Otherwise they are masked before the data reaches the AI.
- Can the AI send emails or change records on its own?
- No. Actions are staged and wait for approval. A company can let internal emails send automatically; messages outside the company and high-risk actions always wait.
- Can we see what the AI did?
- Yes. The audit log records each question, the data used, the rules that applied and who approved each action.