Sandy Carter is the CEO of EQUS, a company that is building the trust layer between people and the AI that acts for them.
She spent most of her career growing multi-billion dollar businesses at IBM and AWS, then helped take Unstoppable.ai to unicorn status. Along the way, Sandy founded Unstoppable Women of AI to put more women in technical AI roles. She’s an AI contributor for Forbes and is the author of multiple books, including the bestseller “AI First, Human Always.”
In this conversation, Sandy explains what founders put at risk when they test ideas on AI tools and why a privacy settings page falls short of owning your data. She also covers how EQUS X, a personal AI paired with a private data store, gives users, and particularly founders, control of what their AI knows.
M.R. Rangaswami: Founders increasingly run new ideas past AI tools before anyone else sees them. What’s actually at risk when they do that?
Sandy Carter: The idea is the smallest part of what you hand over. When a founder works through a pitch with an AI, they also share the pricing they’re weighing, the customer they’re worried about losing, the investor they haven’t called back yet. A few months in, that assistant has a better picture of the company than most of the board.
Now ask, where does that picture live? On most platforms, it sits on the provider’s servers, under terms the provider can change and access can be revoked . You can’t see everything it kept. You can’t pull back one conversation. You can only file a deletion request and hope.
I see three risks. First, training. Depending on the plan and the settings, your work can end up shaping a model other people use. Second, exposure. Anything stored can be breached, subpoenaed, or potentially even sold along with the company that holds it, like was the case with all the data from Spirit Airlines. Third, and the one founders overlook, the founder’s profile. The AI learns how you think, how you negotiate, and what keeps you up at night. That record is worth more than any single document you paste in. Many startups are founder driven, so safeguarding how and what the founder thinks and approaches business is something that shouldn’t be given away so freely to AI assistants.
So before you drop your roadmap into a chat window, read the terms. Know whether the tool trains on your inputs and what it keeps after you hit delete. Then ask the one question that settles it: if I leave, does this come with me or stay with them?
Your AI shouldn’t need a copy of your life to help you live it. Or a copy of your company.
M.R.: You’ve drawn a line between actually owning your data and simply being handed a privacy settings page. What’s on the ownership side of that line?
Sandy: Here are four questions every founder and company should be asking themselves when it comes to ownership: Can you see everything the AI knows about you? Can you correct it? Can you take it with you? Can you take it back and revoke access? If the answer to any of those is no, you’re a renter.
A settings page fails those tests. It lets you toggle what a platform does with data it already holds. The copy still sits on their servers. Flipping a setting changes their behavior, not their possession.
On the ownership side, the data stays in a store you control, and the AI reads from it with your permission, file by file. Pull that permission and the access ends. No ticket, no waiting period, no trusting that someone downstream honored your request.
Then there’s the business model. A private data store means you entrust your data to a company without handing over ownership or control. That trust comes from the company not being in the business of using your data. At EQUS, we don’t have a mechanism to monetize it. We’ve made a public commitment that we won’t.
M.R.: EQUS is built on the idea that people should own their data. How does your Private Data Store make that true?
Sandy: Owning something means it’s yours to keep, yours to control, and yours to take back. Nobody else gets to use it without your say, and when you change your mind, that decision sticks.
That’s the standard we hold ourselves to with EQUS X.
Yours to keep. Your files, and what the AI learns from them, live in your own Private Data Store.
Yours to control. The AI doesn’t get to look at everything by default. You choose what it can see, one file at a time.
Yours to take back. Because EQUS X reads from your store rather than keeping its own copy, revoking access stops it from reading that file from that moment on. Delete used to mean a request. With EQUS, revoke means revoked.
The AI still does what you need. It helps plan your day and keeps track of what needs attention, using only what you’ve chosen to share.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com
None of this was bolted on. Our Private Data Store grows out of our team’s years of work in self-sovereign identity. Most AI was built to take in everything first and add privacy controls later. We built the controls first.
AI companies say they won’t sell your data. We built a company where your data is not our business.