Setting up AI accounts for your team is an afternoon’s work that most businesses never do, because the accounts arrive one sign-up at a time and nobody treats the pile as a purchase. By the time you look, the business is running on a mixture of personal log-ins, shared passwords and free trials that quietly became paid ones. None of it was decided. All of it can be put right in that one afternoon, and this is the order to do it in.

Who is paying for the AI your team already uses?

Start by finding out what exists, because in most businesses the answer is more than the owner thinks. Somebody in the office pays for a subscription on a personal card and claims it back. Somebody else uses a free account they opened at home. Two people share a log-in because the second seat felt like an unnecessary cost.

Each of those made sense to the person who did it. Added together, they mean company documents sit in accounts the business doesn’t control, on terms nobody has read, paid for in ways the accounts team can’t see. If the person leaves, the account and everything in it leaves with them.

So the first step is a list. The policy can come later. Ask everyone which AI tools they use for work, including the free ones, and write down who holds each account and who pays for it. You are not judging anybody at this stage. You are finding out what you own, and the question works far better when people know the answer won’t be used against them. If the list surprises you, writing an AI use policy is the follow-up job, but the list comes first.

Move work onto business accounts, not personal ones

With the list in hand, the main decision is a simple one: work happens on accounts the business holds. A personal subscription and a business plan look identical on screen, and they are different products underneath. The business version gives you administrative control over who has a seat, terms that cover company data, and the option to switch off training on your content in writing. The differences, and what they mean for your documents, are covered in the security question.

The personal version offers none of that on terms the business can rely on, however sensibly the person uses it. This is the point to say so plainly to the team: from a named date, work goes through the business accounts, and the business pays for the seats. People stop paying out of pocket, which most of them will be glad about, and the company stops depending on log-ins it doesn’t hold.

Expect one objection: the free personal account was good enough, so why pay? The answer is that the business is not buying features. It is buying control of its own information, and that is worth a seat price on any tool the team uses every week.

Give the AI accounts one named owner

Every supplier relationship in your business has somebody who owns it, even informally. Whoever renews the insurance, whoever manages the phone contract. AI accounts need the same, and the gap shows quickly when they don’t have it.

Pick one person to hold the administrator role on each tool. They add seats, remove seats, and see the bill. In a business of a few dozen people this is a small part of somebody’s job rather than a new role, and it usually sits naturally with whoever already looks after your other software. The point is that the name is written down. When a seat needs removing at short notice, everyone knows whose job that is, which is the same principle as giving every AI job a named owner.

Ownership also settles the money. One person seeing the bill each month is how you notice the seat nobody uses and the trial that started charging, and that visibility is most of the method for controlling AI running costs.

Match access to the work, not to seniority

Once the accounts are owned, decide who gets a seat, and resist the habit of handing them out by rank. A seat belongs to somebody whose weekly work the tool serves. That may be the office manager before it is a director.

The same thinking applies within a tool. If the product lets you separate workspaces or restrict who can see shared conversations, arrange it around the work: the people running quotes see the quotes material, and payroll questions don’t sit in a workspace the whole company can read. Most small businesses need nothing more elaborate than that split, but it has to be chosen rather than left on the default, because on many products the default is that everything shared is visible to everyone in the account, so check what yours does rather than assume.

Switch on the security basics

An AI account is an account like any other, and it holds more of your thinking than most. The protections are the ones you already use for email and banking, so this step is short.

Turn on two-step verification for every seat, starting with the administrator. Use a password manager rather than a shared spreadsheet of log-ins, and end the shared log-ins entirely, because a shared account can’t tell you who did what and can’t be closed for one person. If your business already signs into other software through one central log-in, ask whether the AI tool supports joining it.

None of this is specific to AI, which is the reassuring part. The National Cyber Security Centre’s guide to cyber security for small organisations covers the same ground for all your accounts, and an hour spent on it covers the AI tools along with everything else.

Add AI to the leaver process

Here is where the earlier work pays off. When somebody leaves, your business already does certain things on their last day: the email account, the door code, the laptop. AI seats join that list, and the administrator you named earlier is the person who acts on it.

The leaver step matters more with AI accounts than with most software, because of what the accounts contain. Months of drafts, prompts and company documents sit in that seat’s history. On a business plan, the administrator can close the seat and keep or transfer the work. On a personal account there is nothing to close, which is the whole argument for business accounts in one sentence.

Joiners are the same list in reverse. A new starter who will use the tools gets a seat in their first week, set up by the administrator, inside the workspaces their job needs.

What to check each month

The setup above holds itself together with one short monthly check, done by the account owner in about ten minutes. Read the bill and match the seats to people who still work for you. Look at which seats have gone unused for a month, and ask why before you cancel, because an unused seat sometimes means the person needs help rather than the seat needs removing. Check that no new tool has appeared outside the arrangement, which the accounts team will spot as an unfamiliar line on somebody’s expenses.

That is the whole job. It is unglamorous, it costs an afternoon to set up, and it means that every AI job you run afterwards sits on accounts you control, with access you chose and an exit you can manage. The businesses that skip it tend not to notice until somebody leaves, and then they notice all at once.