Bring Your Own Model to Work: The Coming Wave of Personal AI Assistants

The bring your own device (BYOD) movement has become standard practice in most modern workplaces. Employees routinely use personal laptops, tablets, smartphones and other devices for work purposes under BYOD policies. Now a new technology trend promises to push BYOD even further – bring your own model (BYOM).

Powerful AI Models Become Personal Assistants

Advances in artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, are making sophisticated AI models available beyond big tech companies. Through consumer devices and apps, AI assistants with advanced capabilities are arriving for individual use:

• Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant devices bring AI helpers into homes to answer questions, control smart devices, take notes and make recommendations. With over 500 million devices now in use, adoption is growing exponentially.
• Apps like Anthropic’s Claude, You.com and Character.ai offer conversational agents to have discussions, summarize content, write first drafts and brainstorm ideas using AI. These apps provide easy access without even needing specific devices.
• Chinese company Xiaoice has over 660 million users of its AI chatbot available through WeChat, social media and other platforms. The bot has emotionally bonded with millions of people thanks to its advanced natural language capabilities.

These consumer products showcase the democratization of AI. Within a few years, people may commonly have personal AI assistants able to understand context, sense emotion, hold intelligent discussions and accomplish basic tasks across home and work applications.

The Promise: Boosting Employee Productivity

Widespread availability of AI assistants that can converse, write content, analyze data and generate ideas promises a major boost in employee capabilities. A few examples of how bringing a personal AI model into the workplace could enhance performance:

• Gathering Research Content: An analyst needs to prepare a presentation on emerging e-commerce technologies. Rather than spending hours finding credible publications, analyzing them and drafting summaries, they could ask their AI to digest the latest industry reports, academic papers and news articles and prepare a summary presentation outline. This allows the analyst to efficiently leverage existing knowledge.
• Exploring Data Sets: A product manager needs to uncover usage trends and customer sentiment from multiple data sets spanning forums, support tickets and device telemetry data. An AI assistant could rapidly process all the information and surface key insights on pain points and new opportunities to improve customer experience.
• Brainstorming Ideas: When a marketing specialist is developing a new campaign, coming up with creative ideas can be challenging. An AI model could participate in brainstorming sessions, drawing connections with past campaigns, trends and the target customer psychographic to suggest innovative promotions, engagement tactics and content themes to make the campaign pop.

In all these scenarios, employees get a powerful partner through their personal AI assistant. Rather than hunting for information, doing repetitive analyses or struggling to generate ideas, the AI handles the basics so employees can focus on high-value strategic tasks. With over 70% of workplace time spent on analyzing information, communication and coordinating - prime areas for AI augmentation - productivity stands to surge thanks to BYOM.

Key Policies and Safeguards for BYOM

With great power comes great responsibility. For organizations to benefit from bring your own model policies, they will need to implement appropriate safeguards:

Access Controls

Clear rules need to delineate what systems and data personal AI assistants can access. Baseline protocols should prohibit them from connecting to confidential databases and assets without explicit permissions. For example:

• BYOM devices may only connect to the guest WiFi network by default, not the corporate network with access to private data unless granted an exception.
• BYOM AI apps should be restricted through standard endpoint security platforms from accessing sensitive information systems like customer relationship management platforms.
• Any exceptional access to privileged systems should require executive approval with a clear business need and sunset date on the access.

Data Privacy

Robust policies need to govern what data personal AI assistants can collect, store and transmit related to workplace activities. Access controls provide the first layer of protection on what raw data AI assistants can directly touch. Additional safeguards should ensure they only gather essential information and handle it responsibly per privacy best practices:

• BYOM devices and apps should only capture the minimum employee workflow data needed to effectively augment the tasks at hand. Indiscriminate recording of conversations, desktop activity, etc. should be prohibited.
• Any data collected should reside only on employee-owned devices, not copied to employer networks without consent. Data should be gathered exclusively to support employee efficiency.
• If workflow data is gathered by a SAAS-provided BYOM tool, the vendor should attest to strong data security provisions including encryption, access controls and protection of anonymized metadata to safeguard both employer IP and employee privacy.

Responsible Use

Clear acceptable use policies should delineate appropriate practices for personal AI tools handling sensitive activities like financial analyses, legal work, engineering specifications and healthcare diagnoses where errors bear significant consequence. Examples of important areas to provide guidance:

• Augmenting vs replacing tasks: Policies should guide responsible reliance on BYOM AI where employees retain responsibility for decisions, with AI used only to augment but not replace human analysis on high-risk tasks until the models have proven very robust capabilities in these realms. This is similar to restrictions developers face on autonomous vehicle driving functionality.
• Disclosing model limitations: Employees should disclose to stakeholders situations where a personal AI assistant is granting key inputs on business proposals, diagnoses, designs or other solutions that will influence decisions or outcomes. This provides transparency on where augmentation is occurring.
• Securing confidential data: Special protocols must be followed where BYOM devices record conversations, process confidential documents or otherwise ingest data with strict privacy or security sensitivity including client information, product designs and patient health records. Encryption, access limitations and data isolation policies will be critical to avoiding breaches.

Violations of responsible BYOM use policies could warrant reprimands similar to inappropriate internet usage or harassment incidents given the risks posed by misuse.

Training

For both employees and their own personal AI assistants, training will help instill best practices in workplace contexts. Employees should be versed in core security, privacy and ethics policies to responsibly leverage BYOM tools.

Simultaneously:

• AI assistants like Claude and Xiaoice often require upfront training focused specifically on new applications like workplace interactions and privacy policies to shape their behavior appropriately for those environments.
• AI assistants designed specifically for enterprise uses will need extensive training on company data systems, access protocols and task workflows before deployment. This is critical for both responsible data handling and business process alignment.

Well-designed training programs that are periodically refreshed will build the critical knowledge base for both human employees and AI tools to safely collaborate using BYOM platforms.

Realizing the BYOM Opportunity

The use of bring your own model AI assistants in the workplace promises to be a watershed moment for empowering employees and driving business results. But to realize BYOM’s full potential, companies must deliberately evolve policies, systems and culture to enable responsible augmentation.

With proactive planning, investing in robust model development and maintaining diligent oversight, employers can pave the way for both cutting-edge innovation and prudent risk management. The lessons from decades of BYOD evolution provide a strong blueprint.

The coming age of powerful AI assistants promises to reshape the workplace and redefine work itself. Savvy leaders recognize this future is arriving soon. Will your organization be ready to seize the opportunity? The time to prepare is now by laying the foundations for bring your own model.