Half your team pays for their own AI on a personal card. You’ve got no idea which one has your clients’ stuff in it. And when somebody leaves, their whole setup walks out the door with them.

If that sounds like your shop, the fix is boring: one AI platform for your agency, and one week where everybody moves onto it.

Key Takeaways

• If your team uses AI across personal accounts and free plans, nobody can tell a client where that client’s data went.
• Pick a platform whose business terms say in writing that your content isn’t used to train its models, and save the link for clients.
• Give every person their own login under an admin the agency controls, so adding or removing someone is one click.
• Keep the team’s custom instructions and brand-voice setups in one shared workspace, so everyone works from the same version.
• Move everyone the same week, turn off personal accounts for client work, name one owner, and check who’s actually using it after 30 days.

Four people, four apps, and no idea where the client work went

Walk around your office and ask everyone which AI they use. You’ll get a different answer from almost every desk.

Your copywriter pays for a plan on her own card because the free one kept running out. Your media buyer uses whatever was open in his browser. Somebody on the design side swears by a different app entirely. And your account manager pastes client call notes into whichever one loads fastest.

None of that is bad behavior. Your people found something that helps them do the work, and they ran with it. The appetite you’d normally have to build is already there.

Here’s what you can’t see. A client asks where their information goes when your team uses AI, and you can’t answer, because the honest answer is “four places, under terms I’ve never read, on accounts I don’t control.” The person paying for the account owns it. You don’t.

The second problem is quieter. Your best people have spent a year teaching their AI how your agency works, like how you write for each client and how a monthly report should read. That knowledge lives in their personal accounts. When one of them moves on, it goes with them, and the next person starts from a blank screen.

How to pick one AI platform for your agency

I’m not going to tell you which platform to buy. Plans and features change every few months. I’ll tell you what I picked further down. The tests matter more than my pick, and they hold steady. I use three, and a platform has to pass all of them.

Test one: business terms you can show a client

Start with the data. On a business plan, the company behind the platform should say in writing that your content isn’t used to train its models by default. A sales rep saying so on a call doesn’t count. Find the page.

The serious platforms publish their business terms, and the sentence you’re looking for is usually short. Anthropic’s Commercial Terms of Service, which cover its API and the other offerings that reference those terms, put it in one sentence: “Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services.” That’s the kind of line you want saved and ready to paste into an email the day a client asks.

Then check the setting itself. Business terms cover the business workspace. They don’t reach the personal account someone opened with their own email, and they don’t reach a free plan. Log into the admin side, confirm the workspace is on the business plan, and confirm everyone you pay for is working inside it.

Once you’ve checked, write it down. Your AI policy names which platform client data can go into, and this is the one it names.

Test two: one login per person, under an admin you control

Shared logins are a mess in a lot of agencies. When three people share one account, you can’t tell who did what, and removing one of them means changing the password on everybody.

You want a seat for every person, all of them under an admin account the agency owns. Adding a new hire is a click. Removing someone is a click. When a teammate moves on, you end their access that day from one screen, instead of chasing a password they set up on a personal card.

Before you buy, ask the plain question: if I remove this person tomorrow, what happens to their chats and their setups? If the answer is fuzzy, keep looking.

Test three: one shared place for the setups your team builds

This is the easiest test to skip, and it’s where a lot of the value sits.

Pick a platform where the team’s instructions, brand-voice notes and reusable setups live once, in a shared workspace, and everyone works from the same version. When someone improves the client-recap instructions on Tuesday, the whole team gets the better version on Wednesday.

It should also connect to where your team’s work already lives, like your shared drive and your project board. Past that, skip the feature checklist. The platform that wins is the one your team opens without being told to.

Moving everyone onto it the same week

Picking is the easy half. The rollout is where agencies stall, usually because they try to be gentle about it.

Set it up before you announce it. Business plan confirmed and a seat waiting for every person. When you tell the team, the logins should already work.

Move everyone the same week. A half-migration means two systems forever. If half the team moves and half stays on personal accounts “for now,” the personal accounts win, because that’s where the old setups live.

Turn off personal accounts for client work. People can use whatever they like in their own life. Put the platform on your approved-tool list and say it plainly: client work goes in the agency workspace, starting the Monday you pick.

Bring the homemade setups in. Ask each person to bring the instructions and saved setups they lean on every week. Rebuild the good ones as shared versions. You’ll find duplicates, so keep the best one and retire the rest. You’ll also find out who’s been quietly building useful stuff.

Give it one owner. Somebody has to add seats and answer “can I put this client’s file in here?” If that’s nobody, the team drifts back to personal accounts a little at a time. I wrote about who owns AI at your agency a few weeks ago, and the platform is the first thing that person should own.

Check back in 30 days. Look at who’s actually using it. If your admin view shows who’s active, use it. If it doesn’t, ask around. The people who haven’t moved usually have a reason, like a setup that didn’t come over or a client whose files live somewhere the platform can’t reach. Fix that, and they’ll move.

How it’s going at Marketing Heroes

I’m doing this in Marketing Heroes, the agency I run, right now.

Over the past couple of years, different people on my team built their own custom GPTs for the work they do every week. Some of them are excellent. Most of them lived in the account of whoever built them, so the rest of the team never got the benefit. That’s a smaller version of the problem at the top of this post, and I had it too.

I picked Claude for my team. All told, people here built 63 custom GPTs. We’ve rebuilt the ones worth keeping as 12 shared setups. Getting everybody working from them is the part we’re in now.

It’s in progress, and I’d rather tell you that than dress it up. A lot of the old GPTs overlapped. Deciding which ones were worth keeping was the hard part. Some good ones still got cut.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can my team keep their personal AI accounts?

For their own life, sure. For client work, no. The terms on a personal account are between that person and the platform, so you can’t promise a client anything about where their data goes. Client work belongs on the agency’s business plan, under an admin you control.

What if part of my team prefers a different platform?

Pick one anyway. Two platforms means two places to check and two answers when a client asks. If someone has a specific job that only another app does well, add that app to your approved-tool list for that job, on business terms, and keep everything else in one place.

How do I check whether a platform trains on our client data?

Read the platform’s business or commercial terms and find the sentence about training on customer content, then save the link. Log into the admin settings and confirm your workspace is actually on the business plan, because those terms cover the business workspace and nothing outside it.

Want help picking it and getting the team on it?

Picking the platform and moving the team onto it is one of the first jobs I take on in the Head of AI seat inside an agency. When it’s done, your team works from one place and you can answer any client who asks where their data goes.

It starts with the AI Workforce Audit, where I look at how your team uses AI today before anything moves. If you’d rather not run the pick and the move on your own, book a 20-minute fit call.