A lot of AI advice suggests that you hand over work to a personal agent, like letting it triage your inbox or shop for you. That’s certainly appealing, since we’re all relentlessly busy and constantly fighting small tasks that take up our time.
But every time you connect an AI tool to one of your accounts, you’re also answering a second question: What is this tool allowed to do on my behalf?
For a lot of solopreneurs, that question gets answered by default. You click “allow” on the permissions screen, and the tool can now reach everything in that account.
I use AI a lot in my business, but I’ve also drawn some very clear boundaries around what it can access.
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Sort your tools by what AI can do in them
Every AI tool I use falls into one of three buckets.
Read but not edit. AI can pull information from the tool, but it can’t change anything. This works well for reference material you want AI to draw from without any risk of it being rewritten.
One example, for me, is pulling financial data from QuickBooks. I let Claude analyze some numbers every month, but I don’t want AI making changes to my transactions.
Full editing. AI can create and change things directly in these tools. This makes sense where a mistake is easy to spot and quick to undo.
I use Canva to plan a lot of my marketing material. Nothing is mission-critical, and the full ability to make changes gives me a lot of capabilities to use Claude with Canva.
Off-limits. AI can’t access the tool at all.
One thing I don’t let AI touch at all is my bank accounts. JP Morgan Chase reported that people were handing over their banking credentials to AI agents like Muse. That’s outside of my comfort zone.
Workarounds can ease your comfort with AI access
Some of my most useful setups give AI partial access to a tool.
Secondary accounts. You might give AI its own limited version of a tool and keep it out of your main account.
I do this with email. I have a secondary email inbox for inbound inquiries to my website. AI can sort and draft replies without touching my main inbox.
Limited permissions
Some tools will let you scope AI to certain projects. I use a database tool called Airtable to manage information for my solo business. Claude can only access certain parts of Airtable, so it can’t inadvertently cause an issue in a tool that I rely on heavily.
“Supervised” tasks. AI does the work, and nothing moves forward until I approve it. With my email example, Claude can draft a reply to an email but can’t send it. The draft waits for me to review it.
Revisit the boundaries as the tools change
Your boundaries may change over time. AI tools keep adding new connections and capabilities. These changes may make you more or less comfortable with what they can do.
Or you might need to “use AI to fight AI.” I was resistant to letting AI access my email inbox, but the inbound inquiries I get from other people using AI themselves forced me to think differently. My solution was the separate email inbox.
In the end, I can use AI as much as I do because I decided up front what it can access.
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