When a business uses an AI assistant built on a cloud service, the data it shares during the conversation — customer details, margin figures, commercial information — travels to external infrastructure. It is entirely reasonable to ask what happens to that data once it has been sent.
Transmission versus retention
It is worth separating two things: data is transmitted to the provider in order to process the request, but the more important question is whether and for how long it is retained afterwards, and whether it is used for purposes beyond producing the answer — training future models, for instance.
What to check in an agreement with an AI provider
A serious provider states its policy on retention and use explicitly, often through a data processing agreement setting out whether the data sent is used for model training, how long it is kept, and what security safeguards protect it in transit and at rest.
The principle of minimisation
Whatever the provider's guarantees, a sound general practice is to send the AI only the data the specific task actually needs, avoiding sensitive information not relevant to the request in hand. It is a matter of prudence that limits exposure regardless of how trustworthy the supplier is.