Guardrails Before Guidebooks - AI Academy Webinar Recap

For this week's AI Academy Wednesday Webinar, we were joined by Janette Roush from Brand USA for a comprehensive and candid conversation about AI policy and strategy. From what is safe to do (and not to do), Janette shared a practical roadmap for building a policy that helps your team move faster and with confidence.

Take a look at the main topics below, or rewatch the recording (coming soon!) for the full discussion.

Why AI Governance Matters

• AI governance is your plan for using AI ethically, strategically, and safely. "You can drive faster when you know where the brake pedal is!"
• A good policy answers three questions: what are we protecting, what are we providing, and what are we expecting?

What Are We Protecting?

• In models are defaulted to learn from the data you input, but you can turn this off in the model settings.
• Personal information can be used in an AI tool for the purpose it was given to you, but not beyond that.
• Public information and your own drafts are generally fine to use. Check contracts before uploading licensed research, and keep personal data like HR salary spreadsheets out of AI tools.

What Are We Providing?

• Provide secure, paid tools and clear guidance to avoid “shadow AI,” where staff use personal accounts and take their chats with them when they leave.
• Assign an owner who crosses departments (it doesn’t have to be IT).

What Are We Expecting?

• Expect transparency, verification, and human accountability. AI-assisted work is still your work.
• If you wouldn’t happily say how you used AI to create something, don’t use it.
• Match review levels to risk: low (drafting, research), higher (company data, analysis, code), highest (sensitive data, agentic AI). Start agents with read-only access and expand slowly.
• Ask AI to read the fine print on new tools, and make sure vendors follow your rules.

Building Your AI Strategy

• Janette recommended using Boston’s AI policy and Brand USA’s policy as starting points.
• Brand USA’s strategy has three tactics: upskilling staff, building industry capacity, and making the U.S. easy for AI to discover and book.
• Start with both front door and back office. Train staff before launching customer-facing AI tools.
• Strong adoption starts with the CEO using AI personally, and a culture of curiosity works better than mandates.
• Budget about $30 per person per month for a paid tool with connectors enabled, and expect gains over years rather than months. Track savings as they appear, such as canceled subscriptions that have been replaced with your AI paid tool.
• Audit file permissions before connecting AI to systems like Box, so it only sees what each user is allowed to see.

Key Takeaways

• Put a policy in place so staff know what’s okay and feel free to explore.
• Pair that policy with a clear strategy, an owner, and leadership that models AI use.
• Start small, review outputs, and build from there.

Thank you again to Janette Roush for presenting, as well as everyone who attended! Next week, join us at 10:00 a.m. for “Pack Your Day” with the Colleen Senglaub from Travel Alliance Partnership.