What Is an AI Policy (and Why You Need One)

An AI policy is the document that says how your organization uses artificial intelligence, and how it should not. As AI moves from a feature to a default part of how software works, buyers, regulators, and your own team increasingly expect one, and a general privacy policy does not do the job, because it was not written for the way AI systems make decisions and generate content.

Two Kinds of AI Policy

The term covers two related documents, and it helps to keep them straight:

• An internal AI use policy governs how your own people use AI: which tools are approved, what data can and cannot go into them, when a human has to review an AI output, and who is accountable.
• External AI disclosures tell your users and customers how your product uses AI: what it does, what data it uses, and, where laws like the EU AI Act require it, that they are interacting with or seeing AI-generated content.

Why a Privacy Policy Is Not Enough

A privacy policy explains what data you collect and why. An AI policy has to cover things a privacy policy never contemplated: whether an AI system makes or influences consequential decisions, whether outputs are reviewed by a person, how you handle model and training-data questions, and what a user can do about an automated decision. These are exactly the areas newer rules, from the EU AI Act to California's ADMT regulations, are starting to require you to address.

What a Good AI Policy Covers

• Scope: which AI systems and uses the policy applies to.
• Acceptable use: what is allowed, what is prohibited, and what data may be used.
• Human oversight: where a person must be in the loop, especially for decisions that affect people.
• Transparency: how and when you disclose AI use to users.
• Accountability: who owns the policy and how it is kept current.

How Concord Fits

Concord's AI Policy Generator, the industry's first, produces an AI policy tailored to how you actually use AI, alongside your privacy and cookie policies, and keeps them in one place so they stay consistent. The disclosures the EU AI Act and state ADMT rules call for become a policy you generate and maintain, not a document you draft from scratch and forget to update.