A few concrete situations where sensitive data and the urge to use AI meet most often.
Comparing a few candidates for the same role? Put their CVs into a spreadsheet, anonymize it with HideReveal, paste it into AI and ask for a comparison of skills or experience. Reveal the answer with one click — while national ID numbers, addresses and contact details never leave your computer. The same approach works for summarizing payroll data or analyzing employee turnover.
Putting together an end-of-month sales presentation? Anonymize the spreadsheet with client names and amounts, then use the same dictionary to anonymize the PowerPoint slides too. Ask AI to draft a summary or pull out insights — HideReveal swaps the tokens back for real client names and amounts only in the final file, locally, on your own computer.
Your own software produces great reports, but before a client signs a contract, you don't want to hand over every detail? Anonymize the data in the report and show the client the structure and the amounts — send the fully de-anonymized version only once the contract is signed. Also handy when you want AI's help drafting a reply to a client without pasting their real data in.
Working in IT or as a consultant, using AI to help troubleshoot? A username, an email address in a log file, or a ticket number counts as personal data too — easy to forget in the middle of an ordinary copy-paste. Anonymize logs and data extracts before pasting them into an AI chat while debugging, then reveal the AI's answer back to the real values.
As a DPO, you sometimes want AI's help yourself — drafting a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) or an incident report, for instance. Anonymize the personal data before asking AI to help analyze or draft the document. And when you spot employees pasting contractor data straight into an AI chat window, instead of banning AI outright, show them HideReveal as a concrete, practical alternative.