A company-wide AI charter. House of Hackney · audit, charter, approved tools and training
House of Hackney sells work that is done by hand, and they wanted the rules settled before buying any tool. We started by finding out how AI was already being used across all ten departments, and the charter, the approved-tools register and the training all came out of what that audit found.
35 surveyed across ten departments Charter adopted company-wide 20 hrs a week back in finance
AI was already in use, with no rules agreed behind it.
House of Hackney is a B Corp luxury interiors company of around 45 people across London and the US, and what it sells is work done by hand. AI had already arrived inside the business, in inboxes and briefs and whatever tools individual people had picked up, but it had arrived informally, with nothing agreed and nothing written down.
They brought us in to settle it properly, in terms the whole company could live with. The audit came first, the charter was written from what it found, and the approved-tools register, the training, the onboarding pack and a standing governance forum were all built on top of it.
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Every department was asked what it already used and which parts of the work it considered untouchable.
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The charter is written in the company’s own language, short enough that people quote it to each other.
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It was adopted across all ten departments, with the Managing Director accountable for it at board level.
What the charter had to settle.
The question coming out of every department was the same one: what are we actually allowed to do with this? For a company whose value sits in work that a person can point at and say they made, that question runs straight into the brand, into the environmental cost of the tools, into what happens to people’s jobs, and into whose data ends up on somebody else’s server. The charter had to answer those questions in writing:
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What is everyone allowed to use, and with what kinds of data?
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Which work stays with people, in writing?
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Who keeps oversight when the tools change again?
The audit, in numbers.
people surveyed across all ten departments, followed by a deep-dive session with each one.
were already using AI at least a few times a week, with no shared policy sitting behind any of it.
daily users rated themselves very confident, which is the gap the training had to close.
were open to training; what was missing was an agreed line.
From audit to adopted charter.
- 01
Survey and interviews across all ten departments
A survey of 35 people, then a deep-dive session with each department, asking where AI was already in use, where it worried people, and which parts of the work they considered untouchable.
- 02
A charter in four layers
The charter runs from what the company believes, through what it commits to, down to how it decides and which tools it actually uses. It is specific enough to settle an argument about a particular piece of work.
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Approved tools, with data rules
A maintained register of what everyone can and cannot use, and with what kinds of data, alongside an assessment record so that a new tool has to earn its place rather than drift in through somebody’s browser.
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A managed Claude environment
Claude set up for the house and properly run, configured against the charter’s data rules, with someone inside the company accountable for how it is used.
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Training and an onboarding pack for new joiners
Skills sessions across the teams, then a pack that tells a new starter what AI is and how this house uses it, plus custom automations built for the specific jobs each department kept losing time to.
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An AI governance forum with board accountability
The forum is chaired by the Managing Director, which puts accountability for the charter at board level. It holds the document and takes the decisions that keep it current.
What the charter allows and rules out.
Approved uses
The unglamorous volume of stock queries and supplier admin, along with first drafts that a person then rewrites.
Asking one place across policies, product data and past decisions, instead of hunting through folders for something somebody settled years ago.
Where AI touched a piece of work, the team says so.
Ruled out
No generated prints, patterns or artwork.
No brand writing published under the house name without a person having written it.
No customer data in a tool the charter has not cleared for it.
Illustrative of where the charter draws its lines. The signed document stays private to the company.
What changed.
The company now works to one written position on AI, and it covers every department, down to which tools are approved and what data those tools may see. The AI Governance Forum owns it from here, chaired by the Managing Director.
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One agreed position across the whole company, covering what to use, with what data, and where the answer is no.
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New joiners meet the onboarding pack before they meet the tools, so nobody has to work out the boundaries by guessing.
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A new tool now goes through the assessment record to get in, and the Governance Forum reviews the charter as the tools underneath it change.
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Reconciliation in the finance team was automated once the rules were settled, returning twenty hours a week to the department.
House of Hackney · AI charter
Adopted across all ten departments.
AdoptedMore of the work.
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