Understand your company's policy, if they have one, on sharing company data with AI, and what the AI provider does with your data. It's not always a question of legality or ethics; understanding when it is, though, is important. Never just assume that the company will be okay with you entering company data into AI.
If you don't already have templates and can't easily find them, AI can recommend templates to use and data to include, as well as generating the file.
I don't generally rely on GenAI to generate standard reports for me, although I may use it for designing the initial report. There are free and inexpensive reporting tools that you can connect to your data for presenting canned/static reports. For ad hoc reporting, I sometimes use a reporting tool that has AI built into it and will ask the AI for data points and summary analyses, and then validate the results when possible. I have found that AI requires complete and accurate data to generate quality reports just as much as humans do. Using AI can still result in an inaccurate report, it just does it faster. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Before asking how to generate the report, I would first ask what company information is authorized to enter that specific GenAI environment.
That requires more than checking whether the information is confidential. The organization should consider data classification, privacy, contractual obligations, intellectual property, security requirements, retention, and whether the AI tool itself is approved for the intended use. Access to information does not automatically imply authority to provide it to an AI system.
Once that boundary is clear, GenAI can be extremely useful for structuring, summarizing, comparing and drafting reports. I would apply data minimization, provide only what is necessary, anonymize or redact where appropriate, and preserve traceability to the authoritative sources.
Human verification remains essential. AI-generated text is not evidence, and a fluent report can still contain unsupported conclusions or errors. Material claims should therefore be checked against their sources, with clear human responsibility for the final report.
For a beginner, I would keep the principle simple: use GenAI to transform information you are authorized to use, not to bypass the governance that protects it. Saving Changes...
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