AI Made Realistic – Managing Hype, Risks and Practicality

The promise of AI is everywhere – efficiency, insight, automation – but so too are the risks it brings! From high-profile data breaches to AI tools producing unpredictable outputs, organisations are beginning to realise the gap between excitement and safe implementation.

There have been many warnings about how AI in the wrong hands could lead to chaos. And indeed, industry surveys reflect growing unease: a recent survey found that 96% of IT professionals say AI agents are a security risk, and yet the same survey said 98% of organizations are planning to deploy them anyway!

The message is therefore clear: AI is powerful – but also risky. Without careful controls, AI can make unintended decisions, leak data, or fall prey to manipulation. Managing this requires a strategic, proactive approach—one that balances ambition with responsibility.

Recommendations to Ensure AI Safety

Below are Centelli’s five essential tips to ensure AI delivers value and operates safely:

1. Desensitise Data: Before feeding sensitive data to AI, anonymise it. Remove personal identifiers – names, addresses, financial or health details – to prevent leakage. Treat your data like gold; only the cleaned version ever meets AI.
2. Use AI to Analyse / Interpret: AI excels at extracting insights from vast data. From patterns in financial transactions to anomalies, its analytical power drives ROI. Focus your AI where it analyses or interprets, in ways humans alone can’t scale. (But for the Execution phase…see point 5 below!)
3. Ensure Guardrails: Ensure you set strict boundaries that constrain how far your tools can venture, and prevent either dangerous prompts or unauthorized actions. You CAN limit AI behaviour within defined zones, so ensure you do just that!
4. Set Clear Rules: Define the what, when and why of every AI use-case. Is AI only drafting routine emails? Performing scheduled data reviews? Or flagging anomalies? Every deployment must be clearly rules-based, to ensure it doesn’t drift or creep into other areas you don’t want (or don’t want yet!).
5. Automation (Not AI) to Execute: Distinguish between AI’s strength in thinking and automation’s in doing. In other words, with rule-based automation you get reliable, repeatable outcomes – and can maintain human oversight over every step of the way.

Summary

By combining AI’s analytical brilliance with automation’s precision, you not only preserve data security, compliance, and transparency….you also super-charge the ROI!

But this isn’t just technical – it’s also about experience. Navigating strategies, designing guardrails, defining rules, and generally getting the right solutions for your precise requirements needs experience. That’s where Centelli steps in.

Why Centelli?

We already deploy AI + Automation solutions, for some of the world’s leading brands such as Burger King and Travelodge.  And we’re a trusted partner for businesses across hospitality, finance, telecoms and more, working with all types of teams from finance to HR, customer service to ops.

To find out how we can help you and your business, why not book a FREE initial call – at: https://centelli.com/book-a-call