Claude for Business in Shaftesbury: privacy first, then the good stuff

On Friday 16 October we ran our Claude for Business workshop in the Ridley Room at the Wincombe Centre, here in Shaftesbury. Five local business owners joined us, with laptops open and a good list of questions before we had even started.

We had planned two morning sessions, one on business and one on personal use, and in the end combined them into a single ninety minutes. It was the right call. Most people who run a small business do not draw a neat line between the two anyway.

What we covered

We covered a lot of ground. The short version:

• Context. Showing Claude a few of your past emails or posts so it picks up your tone of voice, rather than writing like a brochure.
• The daily briefing. With email and calendar connected, asking Claude to put your day in order of urgency.
• Connectors, plugins and skills. Letting Claude work inside apps like Gmail, and typing / to run saved jobs such as an SEO check of your website.
• Markdown instead of PDFs. PDFs eat your usage allowance. Turn them into plain .md files once and use those.
• Being specific. Who you are, who you are talking to, how long it should be and what tone you want.

But the part I spent longest on, and would put first every time, was privacy and setting up instructions.

Why privacy and instructions come first

Most people open Claude, type a question and get going. That is fine for trying it out. But if you are going to use it with customer emails, quotes and your own finances, it is worth five minutes in Settings first.

We went through the privacy controls one by one. Whether your chats can be used to train future versions of Claude, and how to switch that off. What memory is, how to see what Claude has remembered, and how to edit or turn it off. Incognito chats for anything private or one-off. Deleting old chats that hold personal details.

None of it is scary. The point is to know these settings exist and to choose on purpose, rather than finding out later.

Then instructions. In Claude's settings there is a box where you tell it how you want it to behave, and whatever you write there applies to every conversation. Most people have never filled it in. It is the most useful thing you can do in your first week.

One set of rules for the whole team

This is the bit that got people talking.

On your own, your instructions are your business. But the moment two or three people in a team are using Claude, each will have set it up differently, or not at all. One has training switched off and careful rules about customer data. Another is pasting client names into an account left on default. Nobody has done anything wrong, but there is no shared standard either.

So I handed over an instruction prompt that everyone in a team pastes into Claude when they set it up. It tells Claude to say when it is unsure rather than guess, to flag anything that needs checking, to remind you not to share private information, and to ask before doing anything that cannot be undone. The core of it, from the safety handout everyone took home:

If you are not sure about something, say so. Do not make up facts, quotes or sources. Tell me when something needs checking before I rely on it. Remind me not to share passwords, bank details or other people's private information. Ask me before doing anything that cannot be undone.

Everyone works to the same rules on data privacy, and if a customer ever asks how you use AI safely, you have a straight answer. One warning: keep that box clean. It applies to every chat, so it is for how Claude should work, not for passwords or account numbers.

What people said

The feedback has been really good, and thank you to everyone who filled in the feedback form or left a review on Facebook. The first form back gave the session five out of five and said they would recommend it, which made my week.

One request came up more than once: a simple guide to staying safe with Claude, covering the instructions box and the privacy settings. So we wrote one, and everyone who came now has it, along with a fuller handout of everything we covered.

Come along to the next one

The next Claude for Business session is next week, on Tuesday 27 October at Digby Hall (Small Hall), Hound Street, Sherborne, next to the library.

• Claude for Business, 9am to 10:30am, £48 inc VAT (£40 + VAT)
• Claude for Personal Use, 11:15am to 12:15pm, £24 inc VAT (£20 + VAT)
• Build Your Website with Claude, 1:30pm to 4:30pm, £180 inc VAT (£150 + VAT), maximum five people and only 3 seats left

Each is booked separately, so come to one or stay for the day. Bring a laptop and your own business.

Book your place in Sherborne

Cannot make next week? We are at Hungerford Town Hall on Friday 6 November and The Angel Café, Langport on Friday 13 November, with all three sessions at each. Every date is on our workshops page.

Rather have a private session, so your whole team is set up with the same instructions from day one? Email hello@okapiandco.co.uk or call 07824 157730.

I am really looking forward to the next ones. See you in Sherborne.

Jim