AI Policy

Use of AI Tools in Customer Support 

This section forms part of our Shopify privacy policy and explains how St Eval uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools when handling customer enquiries, and how we use AI to analyse sales, customer and loyalty data. 

How we use AI to help answer your enquiries 

When you contact us through our website contact form or by email, your message may be processed using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help our customer support team draft a response more efficiently. 

The AI tool we use is provided by Anthropic PBC, a company based in the United States. It reads the content of your message and suggests a draft reply for our team to review. A member of our team always reviews any AI-suggested response before it is sent to you. No automated reply is ever sent without a human checking it first. 

What information is shared with the AI tool 

The AI tool may process the following information from your support enquiry: 

We do not share payment card details, passwords, or any special categories of personal data (such as health information) with AI tools. If your message contains sensitive personal information, our team will handle it manually without using AI assistance. 

Why we do this 

We use AI assistance to help us respond to your enquiries more quickly and accurately. This is in our legitimate interest as a business and is intended to improve your experience as a customer. We have assessed that this use of AI is proportionate and does not override your privacy rights. 

How your data is protected 

Anthropic processes your data only to provide the AI service to us and is contractually prohibited from using it to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model — including their own. St Eval will never share your data with any AI provider for training purposes. Your data is encrypted when it is sent to Anthropic and is automatically deleted from their systems within 7 days. Anthropic operates under a formal Data Processing Agreement with us that includes appropriate safeguards for international data transfers to the United States, as required by UK data protection law. 

Anthropic holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 security certifications. 

Our commitment: your data is never used to train AI 

We want to be clear: neither St Eval nor any AI provider we work with will ever use your personal data, your enquiry content, or any other St Eval customer data to train, fine-tune, or improve an AI model. 

This commitment covers: 

This is a contractual obligation placed on Anthropic through our Data Processing Agreement. Anthropic’s Commercial Terms of Service explicitly prohibit the use of customer data for model training purposes. We will not engage any AI provider that does not offer this guarantee. 

How we use AI for data analysis 

In addition to helping us handle your support enquiries, we also use AI tools to help us analyse data about our products, our customers and our business performance. This allows us to understand trends, measure how our products and services are performing, and make better decisions about how we serve our customers. 

The data involved in this analysis may include order and purchase information, customer account details, and loyalty programme activity, together with aggregated and anonymised information derived from these sources. 

This analysis is carried out by our team and is not used to make automated decisions about you. No decision affecting you individually is ever made solely on the basis of AI analysis. 

Our lawful basis for this processing is our legitimate interests in understanding and improving our products, services and customer experience. The same protections described above apply: your data is never used to train AI models, it is protected by encryption in transit and at rest, and Anthropic deletes it from their systems within 7 days. 

Live chat and chatbots 

We do not currently use a chatbot on our website. If we introduce one in the future, it will be AI-powered and held to the same standards set out in this policy. We will take care to ensure it complies with our data handling rules and reflects our company values. The chatbot will escalate to a human team member if it cannot help you, or whenever you would prefer to speak to a person. 

How we use AI with advertising and analytics platforms 

We use third-party advertising and analytics platforms such as Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google (Google Ads and Google Analytics) to promote our products and understand how customers find and interact with our website. These platforms use AI and machine learning as part of their own services — for example, to optimise the delivery of our advertising, build audience insights, and measure campaign performance. 

The data shared with these platforms may include: 

This processing is carried out by Meta and Google as independent or joint controllers under their own privacy policies. We do not share your full enquiry content, order details, or loyalty data with these platforms for AI training, and we configure our accounts to limit the use of our customer data for their wider model training where that option is available to us. 

Our lawful basis for this processing is your consent, which you give (or decline) through the cookie banner on our website. You can withdraw consent at any time by adjusting your cookie preferences. 

For more information, please refer to: 

Your right to object 

You have the right to object to your personal data being processed using AI tools. If you would prefer your enquiry to be handled entirely by a human member of our team without any AI assistance, or if you would like to object to your data being included in AI-assisted analytics and reporting, please let us know by: 

Your request will be honoured and will not affect the quality of support you receive. 

International transfers 

Anthropic is based in the United States. Transferring your data to the US is necessary to provide the AI service. We have put appropriate legal safeguards in place for this transfer, including Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). For more information about how international transfers work, visit the ICO’s website at ico.org.uk.