How to ask an AI tool about your business without your customer list

Why the customer list should stay out of the chat

A chat tool can tell you a lot about your business from a spreadsheet. It does not need to know who your customers are to do it.

Google says this plainly. Its Gemini privacy page asks people not to enter confidential information they would not want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve its services. Some Gemini chats are read by human reviewers, including trained reviewers at Google's service providers.

Treat every chat tool that way, whichever one you use. Your customers gave you their phone number so you could confirm an appointment, not so it could sit in someone else's chat history. The fix is simple: change what you paste, then change one setting in each tool.

What to paste instead: counts, categories and one made-up row

Most questions an owner brings to a chat tool are about patterns. Why is one day slow, which service brings people back. A pattern lives in totals, and totals carry no names.

Paste these instead:

• Counts. Visits per weekday, orders per week, refunds per month. Do the counting in your spreadsheet first, with a pivot table or a filter, and paste only the totals.
• Categories. Service type, first visit or repeat, booked or walk-in. These are the columns that explain a pattern.
• One made-up row. If the tool needs to see how your data is laid out, type one fake line by hand. Use a label like Customer A in place of a name.

Never paste any of these, not even once to save time:

• card numbers
• names
• phone numbers
• email addresses
• street addresses

Delete the notes column before you copy anything. If anyone at the shop ever typed a name or a phone number into a note, it is in there.

If your question really is about one person, swap the name for a label like Customer A. Keep the list of who is who in your own spreadsheet, never in the chat.

A worked example: why are Tuesdays slow?

Say you run a small hair salon and Tuesdays feel empty. Export the last 8 weeks of bookings from your booking tool. Delete the name, phone, email and notes columns. Then count visits by weekday and by service, and count how many Tuesday visits were first visits.

Here is what goes into the chat. Put your own totals where it says (count).

Counts from a small hair salon, last 8 weeks. No names.
Visits by weekday: Mon (count), Tue (count), Wed (count), Thu (count), Fri (count), Sat (count)
Visits by service: Cut (count), Color (count), Blowout (count)
Tuesday visits: (count) first visits, (count) repeat visits
One made-up row to show the format: Customer A, color, Tuesday 2pm, first visit
Question: why might Tuesdays be slow here, and what could I test over the next month to fill Tuesday afternoons?

The tool now has what it needs to think about Tuesdays: the shape of the week, the mix of services and how many new faces come in that day. It has nothing that points to a person.

Follow up the same way. If the answer suggests a Tuesday offer for color, go back to your spreadsheet, count color bookings by day and paste that. Every round stays counts and categories.

Turn off training in Claude, and what the thumbs button does

On a Claude Free, Pro or Max account, open Settings, then Privacy, and switch off the toggle whose label starts with Help Improve. Anthropic's page on model improvement settings has the steps.

Switching it off keeps new chats out of future training. It does not pull back what is already there: chats already used in training, or in models that are already trained, stay there. So do this before you paste anything about the business, not after.

For a one-off question, Claude also has Incognito chats. Anthropic says those are not used to improve Claude, even when the training setting is on.

If the shop pays for a business plan, the rules are different. Anthropic says that by default it does not train on inputs or outputs from its commercial products, such as Claude for Work and the Anthropic API.

Turn off Keep Activity in Gemini

Gemini starts from the other side: for users 18 or over, the setting called Keep Activity is on by default. To turn it off on a computer:

1. Go to gemini.google.com.
2. Click Settings & help, then Activity.
3. Near the top, click On.
4. Choose Turn off, or Turn off and delete activity.

Google's page on managing Gemini activity has the same steps. Even with Keep Activity off, Gemini keeps your conversations with your account for up to 72 hours. With Keep Activity off and no feedback sent, Google says it does not use your future chats to improve its models. That promise depends on the feedback part, so leave the feedback buttons alone in Gemini too.

What to do

1. Open the export you would paste and delete the name, phone, email, address, card and notes columns. Swap any name left over for a label like Customer A.
2. Count in your spreadsheet first, then paste counts, categories and one made-up row.
3. In Claude, go to Settings, Privacy, and switch off the toggle that starts with Help Improve.
4. In Gemini, go to gemini.google.com, Settings & help, Activity, click On and choose Turn off.
5. Leave the thumbs buttons alone on any chat with real business details.

If you end up building the same weekly counts by hand every Monday, that job can run on its own: the automations page shows what that looks like, and the guide on automation vs hiring helps you decide if it is worth it. Whatever gets built, you own the code and the accounts from the first day.