Guardrails: preventing hallucination & protecting sensitive data
Two guardrails every regulated user needs: catching fabrication, and never leaking data you shouldn't.
Two risks can end an AI project in a regulated shop overnight: a fabricated answer that reaches a customer, and sensitive data leaking into a tool you don't control.
Guardrail 1 — catch hallucination. Constrain to sources, ask for confidence and gaps, and use a second pass: 'Review the answer against the source. List any claim not directly supported.' For anything customer-facing, a human verifies.
Guardrail 2 — never send data you can't send. Redact identifiers ([CLIENT], [ACCOUNT]); prefer your organization's approved, contractually-covered AI over a personal account; know your data classes and match the tool to the class.
Do these two things and you've eliminated most of the ways AI goes wrong in a high-stakes environment.
Take a real work document and produce a 'redacted for AI' version: replace every name, number, and identifier with a placeholder while keeping the structure intact.
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