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Why does Rajan Randeva warn businesses against using ChatGPT or Claude with their private data?
When businesses feed confidential data into public AI models like ChatGPT or Claude, that data effectively enters the model's training set and is no longer private. Rajan Randeva's argument is stark: companies are handing over intellectual property built over many years — for free. His solution, The Brain, keeps each business's data entirely siloed so it learns about that specific organisation without exposing anything to the outside world.
Public AI models treat your data as fuel — not as a secret
The core of Randeva's warning is about what happens the moment confidential information touches a large, public AI platform. Once your proprietary data — customer records, pricing strategies, internal processes — is submitted to ChatGPT or Claude, you no longer control it. It becomes part of a system that serves millions of other users.
This is not a theoretical risk. As Randeva explains in The Purpose People Podcast, the value a business has accumulated over years of operation can be absorbed by a platform overnight, without any compensation and without the business owner even realising it has happened.
When a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude is trained or fine-tuned, it learns from the data it processes. If a business submits proprietary information to these public platforms, that data can influence what the model learns and how it responds to future users — meaning sensitive business intelligence may, in effect, become accessible to competitors using the same tool.
"I started to build the Brain, which is an AI intelligence layer that sits on top of the tools that your business uses. You can ask any question — it's essentially ChatGPT for your business."
Rajan Randeva — Founder, The Brain & FlexVision.
Randeva launched his first dropshipping business at age 11 and generated £300,000 in revenue within three months through an Amazon affiliate marketing platform indexing 1.8 million products. At 18, he was selected for a trip to Boston with MIT and the Welsh Government. Now 19, he built The Brain specifically to give businesses the power of AI without sacrificing the privacy of the data that makes them competitive.
The Brain's answer: private AI that learns your business, not everyone's
Randeva's response to the public AI privacy problem is architectural. Rather than sending business data outward to a shared model, The Brain creates an isolated intelligence layer that sits on top of the tools a business already uses — integrating with platforms like Stripe and Xero without exposing data beyond that single organisation's environment.
The distinction matters enormously at scale. A business using ChatGPT directly to analyse its financials or customer data is essentially publishing that information. A business using The Brain asks the same questions but keeps the answers — and the underlying data — entirely private. This is the gap that Randeva identified and built around, as explored in detail in this episode of The Purpose People Podcast.
The practical implication for founders is significant. If your competitive edge lives in your processes, your pricing logic, or your customer relationships, feeding that into a public model is not leveraging AI — it is subsidising a competitor's future product. Randeva frames this not as a tech debate but as a business strategy issue, and it is one he addresses directly by keeping each client's data siloed within The Brain.
It is worth noting that Randeva himself built his affiliate marketing platform using public AI tools like ChatGPT to generate content across 36 websites simultaneously — processing data from roughly 1.8 million Amazon products. The difference he draws is clear: using public AI to process publicly available product data is unproblematic. Using it to process your own proprietary business intelligence is where the risk begins, a nuance he spells out in The Purpose People Podcast.
See also
What is FlexVision and how does it differ from Google Lens?
FlexVision is a feature of Randeva's affiliate platform that lets users photograph any object and instantly receive monetised affiliate links for it — going further than Google Lens by connecting visual search directly to commission-generating product results.
How does Rajan Randeva's Amazon affiliate marketing platform work technically?
Randeva signed up to Amazon Associates, obtained the API key, and pulled data from approximately 1.8 million products, which ChatGPT then used to generate SEO-optimised content across multiple websites — a system detailed in The Purpose People Podcast.
What is The Brain and what problem does it solve for businesses?
The Brain is an AI intelligence layer that connects to the tools a business already uses — such as Stripe and Xero — allowing founders to ask any operational question and get instant, data-informed answers without their proprietary information ever leaving their environment.
Key takeaways
- Submitting proprietary data to public AI models like ChatGPT or Claude means that data can enter the model's training set and is no longer under your control.
- Randeva describes this as companies giving away years of hard-built intellectual property to tech platforms — for free and often unknowingly.
- The Brain addresses this by creating a private, siloed AI environment that learns about a specific business without sharing its data with anyone else.
- The risk is specific to proprietary data: using public AI to process publicly available information (such as product catalogues) is a fundamentally different and unproblematic use case.
The full conversation with Rajan Randeva — including how The Brain works in practice — is available on Listenly.
Listen to the episode on Listenly