AI is an incredible productivity tool, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room: privacy. When you feed data into an AI chatbot, you might be wondering if it's going to end up in the training data for the next version of the model.
For some of us, the knee-jerk reaction may be to just pay for the "Pro" version of a consumer AI app. While many of these companies have gotten better at letting you opt out of data training on paid consumer tiers, those protections often require digging through settings menus. If you want stronger guarantees by default rather than relying on settings, one option is to use enterprise-tier tools.
My Workaround: Google Workspace
If you want stronger default data protections for AI use and already need email, docs, and storage, Google Workspace is worth considering. By default, Google does not use your Workspace Gemini prompts, uploads, or responses to train its public models, and they are not subject to routine human review in the same way consumer services may be.
One caveat is that this is a commitment about training, not encryption. Google still stores and processes your data — it just won't feed it to the model or have reviewers read it.
Which Tier?
- For a more private AI chat, Business Starter ($7/month on an annual plan) is enough for many people without higher usage limits.
- Business Standard ($14/month annual, $16.80 month-to-month) is the upgrade if you want Gemini built into Docs, Sheets, Gmail and Meet, plus 2TB of storage and much higher limits.
- Add roughly $10–15/year for the domain itself. If you don't have a strong preference about what kind of domain you get, there are plenty of TLDs that can be much cheaper than my baseline here.
It's worth noting that I clearly have a Google bias, since I've been a Workspace customer for years. You have other alternatives such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, OpenAI and Anthropic's Team / Enterprise plans, and other self-hosted or API-based approaches. The key idea is to prioritize enterprise data terms over consumer defaults if privacy matters.