AI in corporate communication: principles for safe and efficient use

What tasks does AI take on in corporate communication?

• Summarisation: conveying a long email thread or a forty-page contract in a few sentences.
• Information extraction: pulling the parties, dates and amounts from an invoice, or the termination period and penalty clauses from a contract.
• Classification: sorting incoming correspondence into invoices, quotes, official letters or promotions.
• Question answering: answering a question such as "Which item is the most expensive in this quote?" from the document's own text.
• Writing assistance: producing a draft from a short instruction, correcting written text, and translating into other languages.
• Security assessment: assessing, with reasons, whether an email shows signs of phishing.

How can AI be used safely in corporate communication?

1. Permission boundary: AI should only read correspondence and documents the user can already see. When an employee asks the chat assistant, the contents of a folder they cannot access must not appear in the answer.
2. Data boundary: An organization's data must stay within the organization's boundary and must not be mixed with the data of other organizations.
3. Transparency: It must be visible which source the AI consulted to give its answer; users must be able to compare the answer with its source.
4. Human decision: AI produces drafts and offers suggestions; decisions such as sending an email, approving a payment or deleting a document are made by a person.
5. Auditability: Actions the AI takes on its own, such as automatic quarantine, must appear in the logs separately from human actions.
6. Control: Administrators must be able to decide who can use AI, switch it off in sensitive areas if necessary, and monitor usage.

Which tasks should not be left to AI?

AI does not replace careful reading; it takes over the burden of the first read. A legally binding reply, a payment decision or an assessment of an employee should not be based on an AI summary. The summary shows where to look in the document; the final reading and the decision belong to a person.

Similarly, an email draft produced by AI must always be read before it is sent. The draft is a sound starting point; the organization's voice and commitments are the responsibility of the person writing.

How is AI usage measured and limited?

AI services incur costs according to usage. A healthy setup gives the organization a monthly usage allowance, lets the allowance be tracked per product and per person, and, when the allowance runs low, stops automated background jobs first and affects actions the user starts themselves last.

The critical point is this: security should not depend on AI. Code-based controls such as sender verification should keep working even when the AI allowance runs out.

How do employees adopt AI?

The fastest route to adoption is to offer AI not as a separate tool but inside the screen employees already use. A summary beside an email or a question box beside a document is used far more than a tool that requires copy-pasting into a separate application, and it also prevents data from leaving the organization in an uncontrolled way.

What does AI look like in day-to-day work?

Consider a procurement specialist's morning. Their inbox holds quotes from three suppliers, a draft contract and a long internal email thread. The AI summarises each quote separately and extracts the amounts and delivery dates from the attachments; the specialist asks "Which quote offers the shortest delivery time?" and sees the answer together with its source document.

In the draft contract, the termination period and penalty clause are flagged separately; the specialist reads those sections in the original text. A summary of the internal thread shows where the decision stands before the meeting. Finally, a draft reply to the supplier is prepared; the specialist corrects it and sends it themselves. The AI takes on the reading load and leaves the decision and the signature to the human.

What risks does AI usage carry, and how are they managed?

• Incorrect answers: AI can produce an answer that is fluent but wrong. Showing sources and building a habit of checking against the document reduce this risk.
• Manipulated content: An email or document from outside may contain hidden instructions that try to mislead the AI. This risk is limited by ensuring the AI cannot perform actions such as sending, deleting or granting permissions on its own.
• Data leakage: When employees copy corporate documents into personal tools, data leaves the organization's oversight. Providing an approved assistant within the organization reduces this behaviour.
• Overconfidence: A summary does not always contain the detail. In areas such as contracts, payments and personnel, reading the original document should be the rule.

How do you prepare a corporate AI usage policy?

1. State which tasks AI will be used for and which it will not.
2. Specify that the organization's data will be processed only with approved tools.
3. Make it a rule that AI output is read by a person before it is sent or a decision is made.
4. Decide who will have AI permissions in sensitive areas.
5. Monitor usage regularly and review the policy at least once a year.

A short policy gets read and applied. A text of no more than one page, written with examples, shows employees clearly what to watch for in their daily work.

How does AI work in the DBLinx family?

In the DBLinx family, AI works inside the products. In SmartMail, long emails and their attachments are summarised, each attachment becomes a document card, and emails are automatically sorted by content type; questions about an email and past correspondence with the organization are answered with the sources shown. Drafting, refining and translation into 30 languages are also available next to the email. In SmartFiles, every uploaded document is summarised and turned into a four-section report; you can ask questions about a document or an entire folder.

The chat reads only the mailboxes and files the person can access; AI has a separate footprint in each of the two products. The products reach AI services through DBLinx's central layer, and usage is charged against the organization's allowance. Actions the AI takes on its own appear separately as "System" in the SmartMail audit log. Details: DBLinx AI services.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the data go when AI reads corporate correspondence?

That depends on the architecture of the service in use. A setup where data stays within the organization's boundary, access is limited by the user's permissions, and usage is logged should be preferred.

Does an AI summary replace the document itself?

No. A summary shows which part of the document to look at; binding decisions are made by reading the document itself.

Can we turn AI off for certain employees?

In a properly designed system, AI is granted as a separate permission; it can be opened only to specific people in sensitive areas.

Should an AI draft be checked before it's sent?

Yes. A draft is a good starting point, but the sender should read it and verify the amounts, dates and commitments.

Does security weaken if the AI allowance runs out?

Not when security is built on code-based controls; AI complements those controls.