There is a pattern showing up in financial modeling that nobody predicted two years ago: experienced practitioners are using less AI than they were, not more.
Not because the tools got worse. Because the contracts changed. Engagement letters and NDAs increasingly carry a clause prohibiting confidential information from being entered into a generative AI system, and the practitioner who signed it now has a spreadsheet in one window, a chat interface in the other, and a rule against connecting them. The workaround is deliberately vague prompting: debug this formula, explain this accounting treatment, never a real number.
That is a real constraint and it deserves a real answer, not a reassurance. This article is about what those clauses actually prohibit, what actually happens to data you send to a model provider, and which workflows stay inside the line. Sources are linked throughout, because on this topic a confident claim without a citation is worth nothing.
First: read the clause. Three different prohibitions get called "no AI"
Practitioners tend to collapse three very different restrictions into one blanket "we can't use AI." They have different scopes and different remedies.
