Picture a 22-person building-supplies distributor in Beirut. This is a composite, not a client: the company, the people and every number here are illustrative, built from the shape of setups I see in my work. The owner connects a scheduling and email assistant so it can read supplier messages. Ninety days later, the assistant's own activity record shows it used 4 of the 11 permissions it holds. Among the seven it never touched were sending email as the owner, opening the payroll folder and editing the price list.
My claim is plain. An AI tool should keep only the access it has actually used in the last 90 days and that you can justify in one sentence. I check this with four verbs, Look, Change, Send and Spend, on a calendar date. Permissions are granted in a hurry, and nobody is given the job of taking them back.
The afternoon the access was granted
Nobody in this story was careless. The assistant was set up on a Tuesday afternoon, between supplier calls, by whoever on the team was comfortable with settings. The connection screen offered a bundle of permissions, and each one came with a reason that sounded sensible at the time.
Reading supplier email was the whole point. Sending as the owner was ticked "so it can confirm meetings without asking me." The payroll folder came along because it sat inside the same shared drive, and drive access arrived as a single switch. The price list was opened for one import of new supplier prices. That is how you reach eleven: not through one bad decision, but through eleven small, defensible ones.
Here is the part I think matters most. Access granted during setup is the widest it will ever be. On day one you do not know what the tool will need, so you say yes. Afterwards the tool works, nothing breaks, and nobody has a reason to open that screen again. Adding access has a person who asked for it. Removing access has no one.
I treat access the way I treat a lease. It is a decision you make again on a date, not a gift you make once. When the date comes, the tool has to show what it used, and you have to say why it still needs the rest.
Four verbs instead of a permissions screen
Permission screens speak the vendor's language: scopes, roles, "full access to files." Most owners cannot translate that into consequences, so they approve it or ignore it. I replace the screen with four verbs, because each one carries a different cost when something goes wrong.
Look means the tool can read. It can see the supplier inbox, the shared drive, the customer chats on a WhatsApp Business number. A mistake here is a privacy problem: something was seen that did not need to be seen. It is real, but it is usually the mildest of the four.
Change means the tool can edit or delete. It can rewrite the price list, update a customer record, move or remove files. A mistake here is quiet. Nothing announces it, and you find it when an invoice looks wrong.
Send means the tool speaks as you or as the company: an email from the owner's address, a WhatsApp message to a customer, a calendar invitation to a supplier. A mistake here is public and cannot be recalled.
Spend means the tool can move money or commit the company to a cost: place an order, approve a payment, use a stored card, accept a subscription. A mistake here has a number attached to it.
Because the cost of a mistake rises along that list, the leash should get shorter along it. Look can be wide when there is a reason. Change should be narrow and dated. Send and Spend get the shortest leash of all, and should be granted for a stated purpose with an end date.
The 90-day review, step by step
The review takes one tool at a time and about half an hour. These are the six steps I use.
- List every connected tool. Include anything attached to company email, the shared drive, WhatsApp Business, accounting or a company card, and include tools connected through the owner's personal login.
- Write what each tool can do under the four verbs. Take it from the tool's connection or settings screen, not from memory. Memory remembers what you meant to grant.
- Pull what it did in the last 90 days. Use the tool's own activity record. Mark each permission as used or not used.
- Cut what was not used and cannot be justified in one sentence. If the sentence needs a "just in case," the permission goes.
- Put a name and a date next to each tool. One person is responsible, and the next review sits 90 days out, written in a calendar and not in good intentions.
- Re-grant on request, with a reason and an end date. Access can come back whenever someone needs it. It comes back short, not standing.
Step three is where the comparison happens. In the composite, the record showed the assistant reading supplier email, reading calendars and creating meetings, and nothing else. Four of eleven. The other seven were not dangerous in themselves. They were simply unexplained, and an unexplained permission is the kind that surprises you later.
This is a different job from the one-page register I described in How Many Unapproved AI Tools Are Already Live In Your Firm? The register asks which tools exist. The review asks what each approved one is allowed to do.
What the review found, and what it did not
In the composite, the price-list finding was the one that mattered. The Change permission had been opened for a single import and never closed. For months the assistant could have edited the price list, with no reason to and no loss. The review caught it as a near miss, which is the best time to catch anything. The fix took one click and one sentence in the notes: "Reopen only for a named import, with an end date."
The review also has limits, and I would rather state them than oversell it. Some permissions are legitimately rare. An accountant's year-end export may run once a year, so "not used in 90 days" is a reason to ask, not a reason to delete automatically. A review is also not a security audit. It does not test how the tool stores data or how the vendor runs its systems, and it does not replace the people who look after your technology. It answers one narrow question well: what is this tool allowed to touch, and does anyone still want it to?
What to do this week
Pick one AI tool you connected to your email or your drive. Give it thirty minutes. Write down what it can look at, change, send and spend, check its activity record, and put a date 90 days out on the page.
In Lebanon and across the region, a few spots deserve a look first. One is the shared login an accountant uses, which several people may hold. Another is the owner's personal email account, linked to company tools because it was faster that day. A third is the WhatsApp Business number that lives on one person's phone, along with every permission that phone has granted. These are not unusual setups. They are the ordinary shortcuts of a growing company, which is why they are worth a date on the calendar.
If you try it, which verb would you cut first on your busiest tool?
