Vice President · TheGreyMatter.ai
In brief
An AI tool’s authority should match its current job, not every experiment it has ever supported.
AI access grows through ordinary work: someone connects a drive, enables a new tool, or adds a teammate for a trial. A monthly review can make that accumulated authority visible. It complements immediate reviews after departures, incidents, and major changes; it does not replace them.
Start with the current inventory
List the AI applications people use, their business owners, connected systems, and service identities. Include experiments that still have active access. Ask what each connection enables the tool to read, create, modify, send, or delete. A familiar application name is not enough to understand the authority granted by its current configuration.
Record whether access belongs to an individual, a team, or a shared service account. Identify dormant users and people whose roles have changed. Do not paste credentials into the review document. The record should describe ownership and scope while keeping secrets in the organization’s approved credential management process.
Follow the information after access changes
Revoking a connector may not remove documents already copied into an index, exported file, or stored conversation. Check retention and deletion behavior for the particular service. Identify the owner of cached material and backups, and document what can actually be removed. Avoid promising instant deletion where the product or retention policy does not support it.
Use test accounts and approved sample material to verify role boundaries. Check whether a user who loses access to a source also loses access through the AI interface. Include shared links and generated summaries in the review, because information can remain available through a different path after the original permission changes.
Close with evidence and a next owner
Keep a short record of retained access, removed access, unresolved issues, and the person responsible for each follow up. Record a reason when broad access remains necessary and give that exception a review date. If a vendor cannot explain a permission or retention behavior, capture the uncertainty instead of marking the item complete.
Choose a cadence suited to the workflow’s consequences and rate of change. Monthly is a practical starting point for this routine, not a universal security standard. Trigger an earlier review when a team changes, a new connector is added, or an incident occurs. The purpose is a maintained understanding of who and what can act on company information, with enough evidence to correct drift before it becomes normal.
Sources and evidence
AI assisted editorial analysis. Sources checked October 10, 2026. Practical examples are proposed workflows, not reported customer outcomes or personal experience.
One useful next step: Choose one idea from this note and test it at the smallest scale that could teach you something this week.
