When a colleague leaves: the AI part of offboarding nobody has
Your checklist covers the badge, the laptop and the mailbox. It does not cover the six places AI has quietly attached itself to that person.
Every company has an offboarding checklist. Keys, laptop, mailbox, access cards, the shared drive. Almost none has been updated since AI arrived, and AI attaches to individuals in ways that older software did not.
The six places to look
1. Personal accounts used for work. The chatbot they signed up for themselves. Months of conversations containing customer names, draft quotations and internal problems, on an account you have no access to and no claim over. You cannot retrieve it. You can at least know it exists.
2. Saved prompts and templates. If they built the phrasing that makes a recurring task work, and it lives in their account rather than a shared document, the task stops working the week after they go.
3. Automations running under their login. A workflow, a scheduled report, a sync. It runs until their account is disabled, at which point it stops silently, and nobody connects the two events for a month.
4. API keys they generated. Often tied to a personal developer account, often billed to a card nobody else knows about.
5. Browser extensions. Removed with the laptop, if the laptop comes back with the profile intact.
6. What they told the tools about you. Custom instructions, uploaded reference documents, a knowledge base assembled in a personal account. That material is company information sitting in a private space.
Three lines to add to the checklist
- Which automations run under this person’s account? Transfer or disable them before the account is closed, not after.
- Which saved prompts or templates should be copied to a shared place? Ten minutes in the exit conversation, and it should be a normal handover question, not an accusation.
- Confirm that company material in personal AI accounts is deleted. You are relying on their word. Ask anyway, politely, in writing.
The preventive version
Everything above is easier if the work never lived in a personal account. That is the real argument for providing an approved tool: not control for its own sake, but that the knowledge stays with the company when the person does not.
A colleague leaving is the moment you find out which it was.