Our clients are starting to demand that we share our internal AI prompts and raw training data as part of our deliverables. How do we use our V/TO® Core Focus to draw a hard line on what is our intellectual property versus what the client actually owns?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When clients realize you are using AI to accelerate your delivery, they often try to look under the hood. Demanding your prompts and training data is the modern equivalent of asking a software development agency for their proprietary source code. You must address this during your weekly Level 10 Meetings™ and document a clear policy.

Look at your Core Focus on your V/TO®. Your Core Focus defines who you are, what you do, and why you do it. It protects you from pursuing opportunities and making concessions that dilute your enterprise value.

If your Core Focus is delivering high-value strategic outcomes, your value lies in the results you produce, not the mechanical prompts you use to get there. Your prompts and data models are the proprietary tooling that allows you to deliver those outcomes at scale. They are your competitive advantage.

Use Keith Cunningham's Thinking Time to draft your policy. Ask yourself this question: How might we educate our clients on the value of our finished deliverables so they understand that raw prompts without our human oversight are useless to them?

Create a clear boundary. Your deliverables are the strategic plans, the finished designs, or the audited reports. Your intellectual property is the custom AI pipeline used to build them.

Train your client-facing team members to handle these requests with confidence. If a client insists on owning your internal prompts, you must be prepared to walk away. Giving away your operational IP for a short-term contract destroys the long-term value of your business.