Where do your numbers go when you ask an AI about them?

Uploading a profit and loss statement to an AI tool and asking “what should I worry about?” is genuinely useful. It is also, for many tools, the moment your margins, salaries and supplier prices leave the company and travel to a model provider you have no contract with.

That is not always a problem. But it should be a decision, not something you find out later.

Four questions to ask any AI tool before you upload financials

1. Which model reads my data, and who runs it?
Many products are a friendly interface on top of a large external model. Your data goes from you to the product, and from the product to the model provider. Ask for the name.

2. Is my data used for training?
The answer is often “not by default” or “not on paid plans”. Check which plan you are on and read the actual wording, not the marketing page.

3. How long is it stored, and where?
Logs and prompts are frequently kept for weeks for abuse monitoring. If you are in the EU, ask where the servers are.

4. Can I get it deleted?
A clear deletion process, ideally from your own account settings, says a lot about how seriously the vendor takes this.

How we answered them for ExploreKPI

ExploreKPI is a strategy and KPI tool for small and mid-sized businesses. It reads reports, answers questions about your numbers and writes forecasts, so it sees exactly the kind of data that people are rightly careful with.

We decided early that the models doing this work would run on servers we control, not through a rented external AI API. Reports, figures and answers stay inside our own setup from upload to analysis, and no third-party AI provider receives any of it. Data export and deletion requests are handled from the account itself.

It costs us more and limits which models we can use. For a product whose whole job is reading a company’s numbers, it seemed like the only reasonable choice.

What this means for you

You don’t have to use our product to apply the questions above. Ask them of whichever tool you use. If the answers are vague, treat the tool as a public place and upload accordingly.

If you want to see what a private analyst looks like on your own figures, the free plan includes one project, ten KPIs and five AI requests a month.