gov2ai MENAPOINT Conference Iraq 718–20 September 2026 · Erbil, Iraq

By role

Director or leadership

You are the one who will be asked what your organisation's rules on AI are.

This is you if you sign off on tools, budgets and risk, and nobody has written the rule down yet.

What your week looks like

A donor asks how you protect data. A funder offers licences you cannot renew next year. And somewhere in your office, someone is already pasting a document into a chatbot to save an hour, without telling you. Not out of carelessness: because nobody ever said what the rule was.

Start with these three tasks

  1. Protecting sensitive information
  2. Grants and admin
  3. Making sense of large document sets

Tools you can actually afford

A licence you cannot renew is worse than no licence. Staff build a habit around it and lose it mid-project.

  • Claude

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Canva

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Notion AI

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • NotebookLM (Gemini Notebook)

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

Never do this

  • Never buy licences before you write the rules. A tool without a rule is how sensitive material ends up inside a chatbot.
  • Never assume nobody in your organisation is using AI. Ask without blame, or you will get an answer that is not true and a risk you cannot see.
  • Never sign an agreement that lets a vendor train on your data without someone reading that clause. If nobody in the office can read it, that is the first thing to fix.

Your first hour

  1. 15 minutes. Ask your team what they already use, and promise nobody is in trouble. You cannot govern what you have not been told about.
  2. 20 minutes. Write one page: three things nobody may ever type into an AI tool, one approved tool per common task, and the name of the person to ask when unsure.
  3. 15 minutes. Check that the free tier of that approved tool covers what your staff actually do. If it does not, decide who pays before anyone starts.
  4. 10 minutes. Put a date in the calendar to review that page in three months, and say in the next staff meeting that it exists.

Recipes

Last checked: 2026-08-31