Set practical AI tool permissions for a five-person team

Name roles, not vibes

Even at five people, label seats:

• Owner / billing admin — pays, cancels, owns vendor relationship
• Workspace admin — invites/removes people, sets sharing defaults
• Member — uses approved tools for approved jobs
• Contractor (time-boxed) — limited seats, clear end date

One human can wear two hats. Still write the hats down.

Approve a short tool list

One page in the team wiki:

| Tool | Allowed jobs | Data tier | Admin | |------|--------------|-----------|-------| | General chat assistant | Drafts, summaries | Green/Yellow only | Alex | | Coding assistant | Repo work | Code + no secrets | Sam | | Image tool | Marketing drafts | Public brand assets | Alex |

Anything not on the list is a request, not a surprise. Cap active experiments—see start with one job.

Data tiers the whole team can recite

Reuse a traffic light:

• Green — public or fake sample data
• Yellow — minimize/anonymize business text
• Red — never paste (secrets, health, payments, full customer exports)

Post it where work happens. Permissions without a red list still leak through paste.

Account rules that matter more than SSO theater

At five people you may not need enterprise SSO on day one. You do need:

• Business/team plans when work text is involved (check vendor terms)
• Individual logins—no shared “team@” password in Slack
• 2FA on every AI account that holds company text
• A password manager entry owned by the billing admin
• Monthly check: who still has a seat?

Shared logins destroy offboarding.

Sharing and retention defaults

Decide once:

• Are chats shared by default or private?
• How long do you keep project files in the tool?
• Who can enable connectors (drive, email, repo)?
• Are browser plugins allowed?

Connectors are permissions. Treat “connect Google Drive” like giving a badge to a vendor.

Offboarding checklist (copy-paste)

When someone leaves or a contractor ends:

1. Remove seats the same day
2. Rotate any shared secrets they could know
3. Transfer ownership of shared projects/docs
4. Confirm personal devices lost access
5. Ask them to delete local exports of company prompts if policy requires
6. Note the date in a simple access log

Do this even for friendly exits. Memory fades; access logs help.

Worked example (pattern only)

Five-person product team: Alex owns billing, Sam admins the coding assistant, everyone else is member. Contract designer gets a 60-day seat on the image tool only, green assets only. On day 60 the seat is removed before the goodbye lunch. Boring—and correct.

Review cadence

Fifteen minutes monthly:

• Seat list vs payroll/contractor list
• New shadow tools people admitted using
• One incident or near-miss (bad paste, wrong share)
• Cancel anything unused

Permissions rot quietly. A calendar invite fixes more than a long policy.

How a five-person team runs this week

Monday: write the role hats and the approved tool table. Tuesday: turn on 2FA and kill shared passwords. Wednesday: publish the green/yellow/red list in Slack. Thursday: remove one unused seat or connector. Friday: run the offboarding checklist as a drill on a fake departure so the steps are muscle memory before a real one.

Pair with weekly ops review

Permissions drift shows up as surprise seats and surprise connectors. Put “seat list vs people list” as the first five minutes of the weekly AI ops review so access problems do not wait for an exit interview.

Short close

Named roles, short approved list, red data rules, same-day offboarding—that is enough permission design for five people.