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Overview
AI tools are genuinely useful for document work: summarizing, drafting, analyzing, rewriting. The problem is what you have to give them. Paste a client contract or a patient record into a chat window and that information has left your control.
The Safe AI Workflow removes the tradeoff. You give the AI a version of your document with every sensitive value replaced by a label, let it work, then Conseal stitches the real values back into whatever the AI produced. The AI never sees a single real name, number, or identifier. Here's the full loop.
Anonymize your document
Run your document through Conseal's normal flow How to redact a document with Conseal in 2 minutes, but choose Anonymize instead of blacking things out. Every sensitive value becomes a readable label: Ross Geller becomes [PERSON_1], his address becomes [LOCATION_1], and every repeat mention gets the same label. The document stays fully readable, which is exactly what an AI tool needs. (More on the difference: Redact or anonymize?)
Save the bundle when you're done. It holds the mapping between labels and real values, and it never leaves your machine.
The anonymized document — labels, not values
Let any AI tool work on the safe copy
Send the anonymized copy to whichever AI tool you like. Ask for a summary, a rewrite, a risk analysis, a client letter. The AI sees the full structure and logic of the document: [PERSON_1] was admitted to [ORG_1] on [DATE_1] tells it everything it needs and nothing it shouldn't have.
Labels carry the structure; real values stay home
Two practical tips: work with the whole document rather than fragments so the labels stay intact, and if you ask the AI to rewrite, tell it to keep the bracketed labels unchanged. Labels that survive in the output are what makes the next step work.
Stitch the real values back
Save the AI's output as a document, then open Conseal and go to Restore a document. Select your bundle, and unlock it with the passphrase if it's a locked one. Below the values list you'll find the panel built for this exact moment: "Used an AI tool on the redacted file?" Click Stitch into a processed document and pick the AI's output file.
Conseal finds every label that survived and puts the original value back in its place. As the app itself says: nothing is sent anywhere; it all happens on this device.
Done
A green banner confirms the result and shows where the stitched file was saved, with -stitched added to the name. What you're holding now is the best of both: the AI's work, with your real data back in it, and at no point did the two meet anywhere except your own machine.
Why this beats the alternative
Without this workflow, professionals face a bad choice: skip AI tools entirely, or paste confidential material into them and hope. The Safe AI Workflow is the third option. The AI gets structure, you get its output, and the sensitive values travel exactly zero millimeters.
One habit still applies: before the stitched document goes anywhere, read it through. AI tools occasionally drop or alter a label, and a label that didn't survive simply stays a label in the output, so a quick scan for leftover brackets is the final check.