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Question 1

Where does your data go when you use AI?

Q001 · by — AI Strategist, Practitioner & Educator · Founder, AI Center of Excellence

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Understand where your prompts, PDFs and attachments travel, and which infrastructure processes them.

Before the meeting ends

An AI product needs to send your input to wherever its model runs. That input can include your prompt, a PDF or another attachment. The answer then travels back to you.

The model may run on infrastructure operated by a provider such as OpenAI or Anthropic, or on infrastructure run by another company. A product using a local model still runs that model on a physical machine. Local to the vendor does not necessarily mean local to your device.

The first question for the meeting is straightforward: where is our data going? Ask for an explanation of the route and the infrastructure involved before you agree to use the product.

  • Ask where prompts, PDFs and attachments are sent for processing.
  • An LLM runs on physical infrastructure, whether operated by a model provider or another company.
  • Before the meeting ends, ask the vendor to explain the route your data takes.

Transcript

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If you are sitting in a business meeting and somebody is pitching you an AI product, there are a number of questions which ideally you should have answers to before the meeting is over. The first question, one of the most important ones, is where your data is going. There is a kind of misconception, or sometimes people just do not fully understand how LLMs work. In order for you to have any type of answer from a product which is using AI, somehow your data, your prompt, your PDFs, your attachments should arrive at the point where the large language model is running.

It can be the infrastructure of OpenAI or Anthropic or of any other company. Sometimes startups may even use some kind of local models, but still the idea is that the model is living, it's stored on some physical machine, and for you to get an answer, your data should arrive at this machine, and then you instantly get information back as an answer. So, a very important question: where is your data travelling, where is it going? Before the meeting is over, please make sure that you have a full understanding of this question, and an answer from the startup which is pitching you his or her idea.

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