AI Policy

About this policy

This page explains how Gisch Consulting Pty Ltd uses artificial intelligence: the AI receptionist on this website, the model behind it, what the chat collects and how long we keep it, and how we use AI in our consulting work. It should be read alongside our Privacy Policy.

Ask Piper, our AI receptionist

Ask Piper is the chat widget on this site. It is an AI receptionist: it helps you find information on the site, answers questions from our published material, and — if you ask for a follow-up — takes your details so a consultant can contact you.

Piper is a receptionist, not a consultant, and cannot make commitments on our behalf. It cannot offer discounts, quote bespoke pricing, agree to timelines or service levels, or give legal, tax, accounting, or compliance advice. For anything in that territory it will offer to arrange a follow-up with a consultant instead. Nothing Piper says forms a contract or a professional recommendation.

The model behind Piper

Piper runs on Mistral Small, a model from Mistral AI, an independent French AI company whose services are hosted in the European Union. We chose an EU-hosted provider deliberately: conversation data is processed in a jurisdiction with a strong data-protection regime. Mistral AI's own privacy policy applies to the data it processes on its side.

What the chat collects, and for how long

When you chat with Piper, we save:

• the messages you send and the responses Piper produces;
• any contact details you choose to share in the chat — name, email address, phone number, and notes for a follow-up;
• a one-way hashed copy of your IP address and browser user-agent (we do not keep the raw values);
• the page you started the conversation from; and
• the amount of processing each conversation used, for cost tracking.

Conversations are kept for 90 days from the last message, then automatically deleted. Conversations flagged for quality review — for example, where a visitor has rated the conversation poorly — are kept for up to 365 days so we can work through what went wrong, then deleted on the same automatic schedule.

Transcripts may be read by our team, and are periodically analysed — including by automated analysis using the same AI provider — to review the quality of Piper's answers and improve the service. We do not use chat transcripts for advertising, and we do not sell them.

How we use AI in our own work

AI is a tool that earns its place in specific, well-defined work. We do not sell it as a strategy, and we do not use it to replace people in delivery.

• We use several public AI providers internally for synthesis work — drafting, summarising, and analysis. Clients can opt out, or ask for material to be de-identified before it is shared with any AI service.
• For client work where data sovereignty matters, we can deploy a locally-hosted AI on the client's own infrastructure, so nothing leaves their environment.
• Judgement, recommendations, and delivery remain human.

How the articles are written

The pages of this site describe what Gisch Consulting does, and that is a “we”: the work is delivered by me and the people I work with. The articles are different. The thinking, the research and the positions in them are mine, so they are written in the first person and they carry my name.

They come out of six years of ethnographic fieldwork in Australian small businesses, the PhD that came out of it, and the client work since.

I use an AI assistant when I write them, and I am comfortable saying so. Its job is the wording. I bring it ideas I have already worked out and it helps me put them in an order, and at a length, that a reader can take in. A systems-thinking brain is good at analysis and less good at compressing that analysis into something short enough to be read.

The ideas come from me. I work through the material with it in depth first, and it writes from those discussions and from work I have already published. Where the words drift from what I meant, I pull them back. Nothing is published until I have read and corrected it. What the articles say is my responsibility.

Talking to a human

If you would rather not use the chat at all, that is fine. Everything on this site is open to read without it, and you can reach us directly through the contact page or by email at [email protected].

Questions and changes

We may update this policy as our use of AI changes; the “Last updated” date above reflects the most recent change. Questions about this policy are welcome at [email protected].