Handing over capability data on fifty people is a far bigger act of trust than most vendors bother to acknowledge.
Post 4 in a weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using AI-First principles. The decisions we made, why we made them, and how we went about it. Aimed wider than my usual sales audience.
Sit in the meeting where a sales director decides whether to run a team diagnostic and you can watch the question arrive. Not “will this be useful”. It’s “where does all of this end up, and who gets to see it”.
There are two different worries buried in that, and they need separate answers.
The first is whether the answers get used to train somebody’s AI. They don’t. The AI runs through a business agreement that forbids your answers being used to train anybody’s model That’s a very different deal from the free chat tools most people picture when they hear the word AI. Worth knowing before anyone writes off the whole idea based on the free version.
The second worry sits much closer to home and gets ignored far more often. Will my team find out what I now know about them, and will they find out what their colleagues said. That one is answered by how the thing is built, not by a policy page.
Every record is locked to its owner in the database itself. One person’s data can’t be reached from another’s account.
360 feedback is always anonymous, and written comments from colleagues never leave that person’s own report. They don’t appear in any team view at all.
Team findings have floors. Nothing at all is said about a group smaller than three people, and a finding names a theme the group shares rather than comparing people inside it. So nobody can be picked out by working backwards.
Shared report links are stripped of names whether the sender wants that or not, and whoever gets the link can’t turn it back on.
That third rule cost us something and we took it anyway. Written 360 comments were in the team report at one point, and they are the richest thing in the whole set. They are also the quickest way for somebody to spot their own words in a document their boss is holding, so we pulled them back out and the team report is less interesting to read as a result.
What you get for that is a report you can actually use. You can put it in front of the team, work through it with them, and nobody is exposed by it. A report a leader has to keep in a locked drawer changes nothing, because the conversation it was meant to start never happens.
If you’re buying anything that holds this kind of data on your people, “is it secure” is a wasted question, because everybody says yes to it. Ask what their privacy rules are and how they are applied.
