Is your member-based organization using AI more and more in your workflows? Well, you’re not alone; at this point, everyone is!
If you’re using AI for every single task, though, then…well, you can keep reading. In some situations, it’s worth pausing to think about whether you’re using AI responsibly. Using it to draft an email? Sure, that’s no problem. Putting together a newsletter? Go ahead!
What about analyzing sensitive member data or making recommendations that could affect someone’s access, eligibility, or opportunities? Now, that’s a different scenario.
That’s where an AI Code of Conduct comes in. It provides guidance on how to use AI responsibly and ethically, in ways that align with your organization’s expectations. In this article, we’ll explore what an AI Code of Conduct is and why it matters to your organization. Let’s get started!
Key Takeaways
- An AI Code of Conduct is a list of ways your organization has agreed to use AI, with clear boundaries and limitations.
- It can reduce risks around sensitive member information, inaccurate outputs, and inconsistent decision-making.
- Human review remains important, especially when AI is used for higher-risk tasks that affect members.
- Shared guidelines make it easier for teams to use AI responsibly and consistently across the organization.
What Is an AI Code of Conduct?
An AI Code of Conduct is a set of guiding principles that ensure AI technology is used responsibly, through a safe, secure, and humane approach (Coursera, 2024). For organizations, it sets clear boundaries and limitations as to how and when to use AI.
For example, an AI code of conduct may explain:
- What kinds of AI tools can be used
- What information can and can’t be entered into public AI systems
- When human review is required
- How AI-generated content should be checked
- How bias, fairness, and accessibility should be considered
- Who approves AI use for higher-risk tasks
- What to do if an AI-related concern comes up
And, depending on your workflow, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The key point here is that, without a code of conduct, everyone may end up making their own call about what’s okay and what isn’t.
Hicklen (2025) explains that teams may operate in silos and make independent decisions about AI adoption that conflict with broader business strategies or ethical considerations. In practice, that can look different across your organization. One team may stick to basic, low-risk tasks like brainstorming, while another uses AI to draft member-facing content.
You may think, “Okay, well that’s not too bad”, but you can start running into some real trouble when it involves sensitive and/or confidential information. Consider: what if someone thoughtlessly uploads internal notes or member information? Yikes!
People end up making unsupervised judgment calls because there isn’t a clear list of do’s and don’ts. So, in the absence of shared guidance, each person on your team may end up with a slightly different idea of what responsible AI use actually is.
Why Member-Based Organizations Need One Now
That’s why an AI Code of Conduct matters, especially for organizations. Think about it: you often manage a wide range of information. From member profiles, payment details, certification records, to continuing education activity, event participation, complaints…the list goes on! As AI systems learn from vast amounts of data, protecting your personal information becomes more critical than ever (University of Delaware, 2026).
Naturally, members expect their organization to protect their information and make decisions with care. If AI is being used behind the scenes, those expectations still apply. The key player here is trust.
1. You Protect Your Organization’s Sensitive Information
For a long time, we’ve all been setting our rules and standards around what we call data privacy. However, as Gomstyn and Jonker (2024) point out, data privacy predates AI, and the way people think about it has evolved now that AI has come into the picture.
As with any data privacy concern, AI privacy issues often begin with the usual culprits of collecting sensitive information (without consent) and then using it. But this time, there’s an added consideration: how that data is entered into, processed by, or used within an AI system.
Let’s do a little reflection exercise here for a moment: When was the last time you paused and thought about the information you’re feeding to AI tools?
For instance, maybe your organization has just finished collecting data from a recent survey. Now, should a team member simply paste the survey responses into an AI tool to summarize their key themes? Well, that’s going to depend on your agreed-upon protocol!
Maybe your organization does allow this, but only if the data has been preprocessed; that is to say, it’s been reviewed, anonymized (where needed), and handled in accordance with your organization’s privacy standards.
Again, this all depends on what your organization has agreed is acceptable. The more sensitive and high-value the information you’re using is, the more precaution and thought you’ll likely need to dedicate when crafting the rules and limitations of its use.
2. You Avoid Confidently Wrong AI Outputs
Earlier this year, we hosted an online webinar called “Beyond the Hype: What Today’s Systems Can’t Do,” where we underscored one very important point: AI tools typically generate likely answers rather than verified results. What’s more alarming is that it can sound confident even when it’s completely wrong!
IBM (2023) calls this an AI hallucination: a phenomenon in which a generative AI perceives nonexistent patterns, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.
What’s worse, when an AI says something that seems a bit fishy, users may not be as skeptical as they should be because the AI asserts the answer with confidence, even when that confidence is unwarranted (Bittel 2025).
So, how does an AI Code of Conduct help in a situation where AI gets it wrong? It all boils down to setting limitations: how much AI can contribute to a work and what the review process looks like.
Let’s say a staff member asks an AI tool to look at a member’s continuing education records and confirm whether they appear to meet the requirements for certification renewal (again, whether or not this is allowed depends on the model and limitations of your AI use, as this type of information could be sensitive and could potentially violate data privacy laws if fed to a public AI system).
The AI confidently says yes, but it has actually just overlooked a missing requirement or relied on an outdated policy. If no one verifies the answer, the organization could give the member incorrect information about their eligibility!
An AI Code of Conduct can help set clear standards for how AI-generated work should be reviewed before it’s shared, published, or used in critical decisions (like those that affect members!). Additionally, it can further explain how that review should be carried out based on your organization’s established process.
3. You Set a Standard for Consistent AI Use
Because AI is so accessible and convenient, people often want to use it wherever and whenever they can. Now, we’re not here to police anyone about how much they can use AI in their workflow! Instead, we simply want to warn people of the issues that can arise when people start making unsupervised decisions about how a tool is used.
With an AI Code of Conduct, you give everyone on your team the same starting point. Instead of deciding what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis, you can refer to your set rules for how AI should be used across the organization.
For example, your marketing team may use AI to brainstorm social media posts, while your education team uses it to summarize course feedback, and your membership team uses it to analyze trends in member data.
As you can imagine, each department’s tasks can vary considerably. Thankfully, the expectations surrounding them can be quite similar! What’s important is that everyone knows which tools are approved, what information can be entered, when human review is required, and who to ask when they’re unsure.
Conclusion
We’re living the AI reality right now. For many organizations, its growing role in day-to-day work likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. That makes it worth deciding what responsible use actually looks like for your team; an AI Code of Conduct is what gives your team a shared set of rules to follow. Protect your data, and your members’ trust: consider drafting your own AI Code of Conduct today!
Sources
Bittel, J. (2025). AI chatbots remain confident — even when they’re wrong. In Carnegie Mellon University . https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2025/july/ai-chatbots-remain-confident-even-when-theyre-wrong
Coursera . (2024). AI ethics: What it is and why it matters. In Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/articles/ai-ethics
Emtrain. (2025). Ethics and AI: Building trust in the workplace. In Emtrain. https://emtrain.com/blog/ethics-and-compliance/ethics-and-ai-building-trust-in-the-workplace/
Gomstyn, A., & Jonker, A. (2024). Exploring privacy issues in the age of AI. In IBM. https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/ai-privacy
Hicklen, H. (2025). Don’t have a company AI policy? How it’s impacting your team. In Clutch. Clutch. https://clutch.co/resources/ai-policy-impacts-team
IBM. (2023). What are AI hallucinations? In IBM. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-hallucinations
University of Delaware. (2026). Privacy in the age of AI: Why it matters more than ever | secure UD threat alerts. Udel.Edu. https://sites.udel.edu/threat/2026/01/28/privacy-in-the-age-of-ai/
