Keep one client's facts out of another client's proposal

Every services firm has a version of this story. An accountant sends a draft engagement letter with the previous client's name still in paragraph four. An agency's pitch deck carries a competitor's logo on slide nine, left over from the last pitch. A contractor's quote lists a site address in a different town.

These used to be embarrassing. With AI drafting the documents, they get more frequent and harder to spot. An assistant asked to "write a proposal like the one we did for the bank" will happily borrow the bank's figures, the bank's contact names and the bank's special terms, and the result reads smoothly enough that nobody checks paragraph four.

Why AI makes this worse

A person copying an old document can see what they are copying. An AI pulling from a shared folder, a long chat or a connected drive often cannot tell you where each sentence came from. And unless something tells it otherwise, it treats every file it can reach as fair material.

There is also the chat history problem. If a staff member worked on client A's figures in a chat yesterday and asks for client B's proposal in the same chat today, client A is still in the context. Depending on the tool's memory settings, client A may be remembered across chats too.

How we separate it

At Provecta Group we work across more than one company, and each company's work stays with that company. Our written rules, which every AI session reads first, start every task by naming which company it belongs to. Each company has its own files, its own mailbox and its own channels. Records stay with the company they belong to.

We apply the same idea to client work, one level down. Each engagement has its own project folder, and the work for that client is done from that folder.

A checklist for a services firm

You do not need our setup to get most of the benefit. Here is what we would put in place first.

Folders

• One folder per client, with a clear owner. No shared "proposals" folder where every client's past work sits side by side.
• A separate folder of clean templates with no client details in them. New work starts from a template, never from another client's finished document.

AI tools

• One chat or project per client. Never switch clients inside the same conversation.
• Check what memory your AI tool keeps across chats, and turn it off or scope it if client details could carry over.
• If your AI is connected to your drive, check which folders it can read. "Everything" is the wrong answer.

Written rules

• Add one rule to whatever instructions your team and your AI use: name the client before starting, and use only that client's material.
• List the things that must never cross between clients: names, figures, contract terms, internal notes.

Checks before anything leaves

• Search every outgoing document for the names of your last three clients. It takes seconds and catches most of it.
• A person reads the first page and the pricing page of anything AI drafted before it goes out.

The legal side

If the material includes personal data, this is more than embarrassment. Kenya's Data Protection Act, 2019, and similar laws elsewhere, put duties on how personal data is handled and who it is shared with. A client's employee list or contact details appearing in another client's document is a disclosure. Treat client separation as part of your data protection practice, not only as tidy filing.

What this will not cover

Folder structure and written rules reduce the chance of mixing clients. They do not stop someone deliberately copying across, and they do not check a document's content for you. The name search catches names. It does not catch a figure lifted from one client's file and dropped into another's without the name attached.

That is why the last line of defence is a person reading the document with the specific question in mind: does anything here belong to someone else?

Start this week

Pick the document your firm reuses most, whether a proposal, an engagement letter or a quote. Strip it of every client detail and save it as the template. Delete or archive the habit of starting from last month's version.

Book 20 minutes at pgco.world/book if you want help setting up client separation across your files and AI tools.