Acceptable Use

The Terms of Use cover your access to this system. This page covers the information inside it: what you may do with what you find here, and what you may not. It applies to everyone with an account, at every tier.

The short version: most of what is in here is confidential, some of it is confidential in ways that are not obvious from looking at it, and the damage from mishandling it usually falls on someone who is not in the room.

Client information

The system holds the client roster, the coverage attached to each client, relevance judgements, briefs, and the reasoning behind them. All of it is confidential.

You may use it for work you are doing for that client or for Acceleration. You may not share one client’s information with another client, discuss it outside the company, or use it for anything unconnected to your work — including personal trading decisions or passing it to someone who has asked you for a favour.

The fact that Acceleration works with a particular client is itself confidential unless it is publicly known.

The acquisition pipeline

The 360 area contains a hot list of companies under consideration for acquisition, together with revenue and profitability figures, deal phase, vertical and contacts.

Treat this as the most sensitive information in the system. These are independent agencies that have not agreed to be on a list, and in most cases do not know they are on one. Disclosure can affect their business, their staff and their negotiating position, and it can end a transaction.

Specifically, and without exception:

• Do not name a company on the hot list to anyone outside Acceleration, including people at that company.
• Do not discuss it inside Acceleration with colleagues who do not have 360 access. Access is the boundary; seniority is not.
• Do not export, screenshot or copy the list or its figures out of the system.
• Do not use knowledge of the pipeline for personal benefit, including any investment decision.
• Do not mention it in a document, deck, email or message that will circulate beyond the people with access.

If you are unsure whether someone has access, assume they do not and ask before saying anything.

Information about people who never used this system

The system extracts recruitment signals from news coverage: a person’s name, their role, the company involved, and a summary of the change suggested by the article. These records are generated automatically from published reporting.

Two things follow. First, the people named have not been asked and did not choose to be in a database; handle their information with that in mind. Second, these records are produced by a language model reading news articles, so they can be wrong — wrong about a name, a role, or whether the event happened at all.

Do not treat an extracted signal as established fact, do not repeat it as if it were, and do not contact anyone on the basis of one without checking the underlying coverage.

HR and personal information

The HR area contains documents and calendar entries relating to staff. Access is gated separately, and having access to other parts of the system does not imply access here.

If your role gives you access, use it only for the HR task at hand. Do not browse for interest, and do not repeat what you read there.

Working with the assistant

Messages you send to the in-app assistant are transmitted to a third-party language-model provider, along with recent messages from the same conversation. That is how it produces an answer.

Do not paste credentials, passwords or API keys into it. Apply the same judgement to acquisition-pipeline detail and personal information that you would apply to any other external service.

Taking data out

Some export is a normal part of the work. Where it is, keep it proportionate: take what the task needs rather than everything available, keep it on company-managed devices and accounts, and delete it when the task is finished.

Do not move data into personal accounts, personal devices, or third-party tools that Acceleration has not approved — including consumer AI tools, note apps and file sharing services.

Accuracy, and the limits of what is here

Relevance scores, judgements and briefs are produced by automated systems and are wrong some of the time by design. They are inputs to your judgement, not substitutes for it. Check the source before repeating a claim to a client.

If something goes wrong

If you send information to the wrong person, discover you can reach something you should not be able to, lose a device with company data on it, or realise you have shared something you should not have — report it using the support form as soon as you notice.

Reporting quickly makes almost every one of these situations recoverable. Not reporting is what turns a mistake into an incident, and it is the part that is treated seriously.

Breaches of this policy

Failure to follow this policy may lead to access being withdrawn and to action under Acceleration’s disciplinary procedures. Serious cases may have consequences beyond that.