Why "just use ChatGPT" is bad advice for your company

The cheapest AI advice in any boardroom is also the most popular one: just tell the staff to use ChatGPT. It costs nothing, it sounds practical, and everyone leaves the meeting feeling the AI question has been dealt with.

It hasn’t. It’s just been spread around.

Here’s what gets missed. One person using a chatbot does get faster. That part is true, and it’s why the advice sounds reasonable: the executive saying it has usually tried the tool, liked it, and assumed everyone else will have the same experience. But a company isn’t one person. Forty people quietly pasting things into free chatbots isn’t a company using AI. It’s forty different ways of working that nobody can see, and nobody in the building can tell you what was sent where, what came back, or which of it ended up in front of a customer.

To be clear, I’m not saying AI is overhyped. I build with these models every day. They’re in the work behind the products I ship, from bookkeeping to writing tools, and they’re very capable. That’s the problem. Capable tools with no rules don’t give you a capable company. They give you mistakes that are quick, confident and hard to spot.

If your company runs on “just use ChatGPT”, some of these are probably happening already.

Your data is leaving the building. Once someone pastes a customer list, a contract or a price list into a free chatbot, it’s out of your hands, under terms nobody in the company has read, stored in a country nobody checked. Nigeria now has a data protection law with real penalties, and “a junior staff member pasted it into a chatbot” isn’t a defence you want to rely on. Worse, you currently have no way of knowing how often it happens. Every time I’ve asked business leaders what has already been pasted where, the honest answer has been that nobody knows.

The answers can be wrong in ways your staff can’t check. These tools don’t hesitate. They write smooth, believable text at the same speed whether it’s right or wrong, and that smoothness is the trap. A wrong number in a rough handwritten note makes you look twice. The same wrong number in a neat paragraph goes straight through. The people who lean on the tool hardest are usually the ones least able to catch its mistakes, because if they could, they wouldn’t have needed it.

The skill leaves with one person. Left alone, one person in the office gets really good at this. Their prompts, their workarounds, their sense of what the tool can be trusted with, all of it lives in their head and their personal account. When they resign, your company’s whole AI capability goes with them. Nothing was written down, because none of it was ever official.

Nothing builds up. This one is quiet and it’s the most expensive. Forty people solving the same problems separately means the same lessons get learned forty times and kept nowhere. There’s no shared way of doing things and nothing that improves month to month. A few individuals got a bit faster, and the company learned nothing.

So what does a sensible version look like? Not a ban. Banning the tools just pushes people onto their personal phones, where you can see even less. And not a big programme either. I wrote last week about five questions to ask instead of writing an AI strategy, and the answer here is the same idea on a smaller scale.

Pick one queue, one place where work sits and waits for someone to read it. Put the tool inside that workflow officially, instead of asking people to go off to a chatbot and paste things. Give one person the job of making it work and deciding how it’s used. And write down what kind of data can leave the building and what kind never can. That last part is one meeting and one page, and it puts you ahead of most companies on this continent.

Only when that first queue is working, move on to the next one.

The real problem with “just use ChatGPT” is who ends up making the decision. Whether AI touches your customers, your contracts and your numbers is a decision for leadership. Leave it loose and that decision falls to whoever has a browser tab open, so your most junior staff are making it forty times a day, with nobody watching and no record. Doing it properly means the decision gets made once, on purpose, by the people whose job it is.

The companies that get this right won’t be the ones whose staff started using chatbots first. They’ll be the ones where the whole company got better at it, not just a few people inside it.

I write one of these every week, on AI and business in Africa as it actually works. If your company is somewhere between “we should use AI” and knowing what that means on a Tuesday morning, it’s a conversation I have a lot, and I’m happy to have it with you.