How We Use AI At The CEO Collective
Nobody requires a business our size to publish something like this. We are doing it anyway, for the same reason we publish our terms and our privacy policy.
You are working with us, or thinking about it. AI touches parts of that work. You should be able to find out which parts without having to ask, and you should be able to hold us to what is written here.
We review this every quarter, on the same rhythm we use for everything else, because the tools change constantly and a policy that is quietly out of date is worse than no policy at all.
Whose Judgement This Is
Before any question about tools, there is a question that matters more. Whose thinking are you actually getting?
Mine. Racheal Cook. Eighteen years of working with real businesses, thousands of hours with clients, and a set of frameworks that came out of that work and nowhere else. The 90 Day CEO Operating System®, the Client Growth Engine™, and the Team Growth Engine™ were built in practice, over years, with people. They were not generated by an AI system and they are not derived from one.
The point of view is mine. The strategy is mine. The decisions about what is worth saying at all are mine.
And everything that leaves this business has a person who reviewed it and is responsible for it. AI does not approve anything, send anything, publish anything, or decide anything. When something is wrong, a person got it wrong.
What We Will Never Do
These are not negotiable and we will not make an exception on request.
We will never put a synthetic version of a real person in front of you.
No AI-generated photos of me. No AI video, no voice clone, no avatar, and none of my team or my clients either.
The photos of me on this site are real photos of me, taken by a photographer, in a room I was actually standing in. I barely even edit them. If you are looking at a picture of me, that is what I look like. If you are hearing my voice, I said it. If you are watching a video, I recorded it.
Where AI shows up in design work, and most design tools now have it built in, it is for illustration and layout elements, never for representing a person as though a camera was there.
We will never publish content AI generated content.
I use AI to organize my own thinking into outlines and first drafts. I have always done a version of this on my own or with a team. What never happens is a machine generating a point of view and my name going on it. The argument, the stories, and the position are mine, every time.
We will never make up evidence.
No AI-generated statistics, quotes, client results, or case studies. Every number and every quote in our published work traces back to a source we can point at. If we cannot verify it, we do not use it.
We will never replace relationships with AI.
Coaching calls, community responses, and consultations happen with people. We do not run an AI agent that answers you as us.
Where we actually use AI
Named plainly. If something is not on this list, it is not happening. If we start doing something new, this list changes before the work does.
Research and analysis. Market research, competitive analysis, and voice of customer work. Findings get verified against real sources before they go anywhere.
Outlines and first drafts. I talk through my thinking out loud and AI helps organize it into structure. I write and edit from there.
Internal documentation. Our own SOPs, processes, and project setup.
Podcast production. Transcription and editing for Promote Yourself to CEO®. The voice you hear is always mine, recorded by me. The ‘Umms’ and akward pauses are edited out by AI.
Session transcripts and notes. Recordings of member calls are transcribed automatically, and we use those transcripts to build your notes and follow-ups.
Client tools. Guided tools inside our programs that take your answers and your material and structure them into something usable. Your inputs, your outputs.
Your calls, your recordings, your information
This is the section that matters most, so it gets the most detail.
We record and take notes with AI. Member calls, coaching calls, and program sessions are recorded, and transcripts are generated automatically by the platforms we use. This is not new and it is not a change. We are writing it down because you should not have to work it out from context.
What we do with those AI recordings. Transcripts and recordings are stored so you can go back to them, and we use them to write your session notes, track what you said you would do, and find the themes that shape our teaching.
What we do not do with AI recordings. We do not sell them. We do not publish them. We do not share your specific situation outside the room where you said it.
On training. Our AI accounts are configured so that our inputs are not used to train models, and we have reviewed the settings on the platforms that generate transcripts before anything reaches us, so the whole chain is covered rather than just the last step.
What we keep out entirely. We do not put your financial records, contracts, personnel files, or any material a third party gave you in confidence into AI tools.
If you would rather we did not. Tell us. If you want a call left out of the transcript workflow, or something you shared excluded, we will do that. You do not owe us a reason.
What You Build Is Yours
Anything you create inside our tools belongs to you. Your voice guide, your brand guide, your story vault, your research. You keep it, you can take it with you, and it does not become ours because it passed through something we built.
The Tools We Use
We use Claude by Anthropic, ChatGPT by OpenAI, Descript, Canva, Circle, Zoom, and Vimeo. Several of these were not built as AI tools and have added AI features over time, which is true of nearly every piece of software a small business runs on right now.
We review this list quarterly and update it when we adopt or drop something. If you want to know what touched a specific piece of work, ask and we will tell you.
Retrieval, Yes. Training, No.
Two different things get talked about as though they are one, and they are not.
Retrieval is when an AI search tool reads what we published, answers somebody’s question with it, and points them back here. We want that. A lot of people find this work through Claude, ChatGPT and tools like it, and we write with that in mind. Read us, cite us, send people over.
Training is when our writing gets absorbed into a model as raw material, uncredited, to be resold as somebody else’s output. We do not consent to that.
We signal this technically as well as saying it here. Retrieval crawlers are welcome. If you are collecting training data, you do not have permission.
We know these signals rely on whoever is crawling choosing to honor them, and we are saying it anyway, because the argument we make everywhere else applies here too. The people who make something should get some of the upside of it.
How We Disclose AI
We do not stamp a disclaimer on everything. This page is the disclosure.
If you want to know whether AI touched a specific piece of work, ask and I will tell you honestly. The answer is often yes for a first draft, and always no for the point of view.
Our Team and The People We Work With
This policy covers our employees, our contractors, and anyone producing work in our name.
We are honest that this part is new. We are documenting expectations now that this page exists, and everyone working with us is expected to operate inside it. Where a contractor uses AI in work they do for us, they are accountable for what they hand over under the same standard as anyone else.
What We Teach
We do not sell AI programs. AI is not the product.
The product is the methodology, the community, and the planning rhythm. We use AI with discernment and we teach our members to do the same, which mostly means helping them get clear enough on their own voice, their own point of view, and their own stories that no tool can flatten them.
If You Need Something Different
If you are working with us and your organization has its own AI requirements, or you want AI kept out of a piece of work entirely, say so at the start. We will work inside your requirements.
Questions about anything on this page go to hello@theceocollective.com
Last updated September 2, 2026. Reviewed quarterly.