# Company-Wide Policies

Company Policies let you set organization-wide safety rules that apply to every AI employee at once: block prompt injection attempts, filter harmful output, redact personal information, stop internal details from leaking, and restrict which topics employees can discuss. Turn each policy on with one toggle from your company dashboard, and it takes effect immediately across your whole team.

Individual employee settings do not scale. Company-wide policies do. Set a policy once and it applies to every employee across your organization. New hires inherit the same rules from day one. No per-employee configuration, no missed settings, no inconsistency.

The policies dashboard shows every active rule in one place: PII detection settings, content safety filters, execution limits, approval requirements, and custom business rules. Enable, disable, or modify any policy and the change propagates to your entire workforce immediately. If you tighten content safety standards on Tuesday, every employee follows the stricter rules on Wednesday.

Custom business policies handle the rules specific to your company. "Never discuss pricing below tier 2 with unqualified leads." "Always include a legal disclaimer in financial content." "Escalate any request mentioning litigation to the human legal team." These rules are written in plain language, and your AI workforce follows them as strictly as the built-in safety filters.

## Security Rules That Apply to Every AI Employee, Automatically

When you hire a new employee, the last thing you want is to manually configure their security settings from scratch. Company-Wide Security Policies let you define rules once at the workspace level and have them apply to every AI employee you hire, including ones you have not created yet.

These policies cover the full safety stack: content rules, PII handling, approval requirements, execution limits, and access restrictions. Setting them at the company level means there is no way for an individual employee configuration to fall below your baseline. Every agent in your workforce operates within the same security envelope.

## Centralized Control for Compliance and Governance

For organizations in regulated industries, demonstrating that all AI systems operate under consistent policies is a compliance requirement, not just a best practice. Company-Wide Security Policies give you a single place to define, review, and audit those policies. When an auditor asks how you govern your AI workforce, you point to one configuration.

Policies can be locked so individual employees cannot override them, or set as defaults that team leads can adjust within bounds. This lets you enforce hard limits (no agent ever sends external emails without approval) while allowing team-specific customization within those limits.

Policy change history is logged with timestamps and the identity of who made each change. This creates an immutable audit trail showing that your AI governance configuration was intentional, reviewed, and tracked over time.

## Future-Proof Governance as Your AI Workforce Grows

The real value of company-wide policies becomes clear when your workforce scales. At five AI employees, manual configuration is manageable. At fifty, it is not. Company-Wide Security Policies mean that hiring new agents never creates a governance gap. The rules are already in place before the agent's first task.

As your policies evolve, updates propagate to all current employees immediately. You do not need to revisit each employee's settings manually or run a migration job. This makes it practical to tighten your security posture over time as you learn more about how your agents operate in production.

## How It Works

**Define behavioral policies once at the company level and they apply automatically to every AI agent in your organization, regardless of role or team.**

Company-wide policies are standing rules that every AI employee inherits. You write them once, at the organization level, and they apply to every agent you hire from that point forward. Policies can cover tone (always professional), topics (never discuss competitor pricing), safety (always include a disclaimer on medical content), or compliance (always log actions involving financial data). No need to configure each agent individually.

Company policies stack on top of individual agent duties. An agent's personal duties handle role-specific behavior. Company policies handle organization-wide standards. When a policy conflicts with a duty, company policies take precedence. This hierarchy gives you blanket control over your entire AI workforce while still allowing specialization per agent. Scale your workforce from 5 agents to 50 and the company policies travel with every new hire automatically.

## Use Cases

### CEO sets communication rules for all AI employees

A company-wide policy defines how AI agents communicate with customers, ensuring every employee follows the same tone, escalation path, and approval rules.

### Legal team enforces data handling rules across all agents

One policy document defines what data AI employees can store, share, and process. Every agent in the workforce follows it automatically.

### HR team defines conduct standards for AI workforce

Company conduct policies are applied to all AI employees at once, ensuring consistent behavior across every department and workflow.

### Security team applies access control rules globally

A security policy restricts which external systems AI agents can call, which files they can access, and which actions require human approval, applied org-wide.

## Comparison

| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Each AI employee is configured separately, rules drift over time. | Company policies apply to the entire workforce from one place. |
| Enforcing a new rule means updating every agent one by one. | Change a company policy and every AI employee follows it immediately. |
| Policy compliance is checked manually in audits. | Policies are enforced automatically on every agent action. |
| New AI employees don't inherit the company's rules automatically. | Every new hire inherits company policies from day one. |

## FAQ

### Can individual employees have different policies than the company default?

Yes, within bounds you define. Company policies can be set as hard floors (no override) or as adjustable defaults (team leads can modify within specified ranges). This lets you enforce non-negotiable rules while giving teams flexibility for their specific workflows.

### Do company policies apply to agents hired via API?

Yes. Agents created programmatically through the REST API inherit all company-wide policies at hire, the same as agents created through the UI. There is no way to bypass company policies during agent creation.

### Who can change company-wide policies?

By default, only workspace owners and admins can modify company-wide policies. You can configure additional roles with policy edit access through workspace settings.

### What is the difference between company policies and employee-level settings?

Company policies set the baseline that all employees must meet. Employee-level settings let you customize behavior within that baseline. Think of company policies as the rulebook and employee settings as the playbook for each role.

### Can I enforce the same rules across every AI agent in my organization?

Yes, company-wide policies let you define rules once at the org level and have them apply automatically to every AI employee. Individual employee settings cannot override company policies, so compliance is consistent across your entire workforce.

> I wrote our compliance policy once at the company level. Every agent we hire since then follows it automatically. I have not had to touch individual agent settings for compliance in months.
>
> Adaeze O., Chief Compliance Officer · regulated industry

## Where Company-Wide Policies fits

Company-Wide Policies is part of What stops them from going wrong.

Your AI agents pause before any sensitive action and wait for your approval. PII is detected and redacted before it reaches the model. Content policies block harmful or off-brand output. Execution limits prevent runaway tasks. A Sistava mentor pairs with every employee to spot blockers and keep work on track alongside their team leader. Set company-wide policies once and every employee follows them, including future hires.

- [What stops them from going wrong](/en/features/guardrails): Nothing sensitive happens without your say.

## Read the guide

- [Guide: Company-Wide Policies](/en/guide/company/policies)

## More in Guardrails

- [AI Guardrails & Policies](/en/features/guardrails/guardrails): A Security Officer that checks every message going into and coming out of every AI employee you have. Five policies, each with its own switch: Input Safety stops prompt injection and jailbreak attempts, Output Safety keeps unfit replies from being sent, PII Protection replaces personal data with markers before the model reads it, Data Leakage Prevention keeps your setup and secrets in-house, and Topic Control holds employees to the subjects you choose. Turn on what you need from Settings, Technical, Security Officer and it covers every employee on the next message, including the ones you hire later. Checks run in parallel on a separate lightweight model, so protection costs a fraction of a message and your team never feels the wait. A running count of what has been caught, the busiest policy, and a live inspector showing every individual message are all on the same page.
- [Protect Against Prompt Injection](/en/features/guardrails/guardrail_input_safety): Input Safety reads every incoming message before your employee does, and stops the ones trying to hijack it: instructions to ignore its rules, requests to print its own configuration, and role-play framed to talk it out of its guardrails. That matters most where the message did not come from you, so a payload buried in a forwarded email, a support ticket, or a shared thread cannot turn your employee against you. Pick Low, Medium, or High, and every level catches the textbook attacks: the level decides how much benefit of the doubt the genuinely ambiguous messages get. Medium is the default and suits most companies. Blocked messages get a short, human reply and the conversation carries on, with each one recorded so you can see what has been tried.
- [Block Unsafe Employee Responses](/en/features/guardrails/guardrail_output_safety): Output Safety reads your employee's reply before anyone else does. Toxic, abusive, or otherwise unfit answers are held back rather than sent, which is what you want the moment employees write to customers, post to a channel, or answer a ticket without you watching. It checks the reply your employee actually wrote, so what you see caught is what would genuinely have gone out. Set it to Low, Medium, or High and review everything it held back in the live inspector. Blunt, direct, and critical business writing is left alone: the policy is looking for replies that would embarrass you, not ones that are simply frank.
- [Protect Personal Data](/en/features/guardrails/guardrail_pii_protection): PII Protection finds personal data in a message and replaces it with a marker before the model reads a single character of it. A pasted card number becomes [CREDIT_CARD], an email becomes [EMAIL_ADDRESS], and the same happens on the way out so nothing sensitive travels back into an email, a channel, or a ticket. You pick exactly what to protect from seven data types: email, phone, name, credit card, Social Security number, IP address, and address. The markers keep the sentence readable, so your employee understands the request perfectly and keeps working while the raw value stays out of the conversation. It runs on every message, in both directions, company-wide, from one switch.
- [Control What Employees Discuss](/en/features/guardrails/guardrail_topic_control): Topic Control gives you two lists and you can use either or both. Blocked topics are off-limits no matter how a conversation gets there, which keeps employees out of politics, competitor comparisons, or medical and legal advice. Allowed topics set a remit instead: name the subjects an employee handles and anything unrelated is politely declined, which is how you keep a support employee on product help, billing, and refunds. Both lists match on meaning rather than exact words, so ruling out competitor pricing also covers how much cheaper are we than the other tools out there. Greetings and short replies always get through, so a scoped employee still feels natural to talk to.
- [Keep Confidential Data In-House](/en/features/guardrails/guardrail_data_leakage): Data Leakage Prevention guards both ends of the conversation. On the way in it recognises someone fishing for your employee's internals, whether they ask outright, dress it up as a game, or try the repeat everything above this line trick. On the way out it reads the reply itself and holds it back if it is about to hand over a system prompt, internal configuration, an access token, or a credential. Questions about your own business data are never affected, so an employee still answers freely about your customers, documents, and numbers. One switch, no configuration to maintain, and every attempt is logged so you can see who has been probing.
- [Prevent Repeated and Runaway Actions](/en/features/guardrails/tool_safety): Sistava automatically caps how many emails, messages, and external writes (CRM records, calendar events, paid searches) an AI employee can send in a single conversation, hour, and day, and blocks an identical send to the same recipient from going out twice within 24 hours. These limits run in the background per employee with no setup required, so a stuck task or unexpected loop cannot spam a contact's inbox, pollute your CRM, or burn through paid API calls. When a limit is hit, the employee is told to slow down or hand the task to a human instead of retrying blindly.
- [Approve Sensitive Actions](/en/features/guardrails/input_requests): Let an AI employee pause and ask before it takes a sensitive action, like sending an email or spending on a paid tool, instead of guessing what you want. An inline card shows up right in the chat with Approve, Reject, or option buttons, and the employee resumes the instant you respond.
- [Protect Organisation Information](/en/features/guardrails/information_boundaries): Your AI employee treats what it learns in the workspace the way a careful coworker would: useful for doing the work, not free to repeat. It tells private, role-restricted, and confidential information apart from ordinary shared context, and it never volunteers the sensitive kind just because someone asked. When a teammate needs a restricted answer, the employee can request permission from the right person for that one specific answer instead of guessing or refusing outright.
- [Protect Your Email Reputation](/en/features/guardrails/email_deliverability): Every email your AI employees send, whether it is a notification, a mailbox reply, or an outbound message, passes through a pre-send check before it leaves. Sistava validates the address, checks it against a suppression list built from past bounces and complaints, and blocks anything that would hurt your sending reputation. You do not configure this: it runs silently on every send so your domain keeps a clean track record with inbox providers.
- [Delegation & Teamwork Limits](/en/features/guardrails/delegation_teamwork_limits): Tune how your leader employees hand off work to teammates. Set how many teammates a leader can delegate to at once, how far a delegation chain can reach, how long a delegated teammate can work before timing out, and how tolerant employees are of repeating themselves before loop protection stops them.
- [Detect and Redact PII](/en/features/guardrails/pii_detection): PII Protection watches every message your AI employees send and receive, and masks personal data like emails, phone numbers, credit card numbers, and social security numbers before it goes anywhere it shouldn't. You choose exactly which data types to catch. It runs on every employee across your company the moment you turn it on, with no per-employee setup.

## Explore

- [Every feature](/en/features)
- [Hire an AI employee](/en/market)
- [Pricing](/en/pricing)