An AI charter for an interiors brand
House of Hackney · audit, charter, approved tools and training
OpenKit wrote House of Hackney a company-wide AI charter that says which work AI may carry and which stays with the makers. The finance team got twenty hours a week back once OpenKit automated its reconciliation.
Overview
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 was already in its inboxes, its briefs and whatever tools people had picked up for themselves, with nothing agreed or written down. Every department was asking what it was allowed to do with it. The answer had to cover the brand, the environmental cost of the tools, people’s jobs and whose data ends up on somebody else’s server.
OpenKit wrote the charter from an audit of all ten departments and set up the approved tools and training that go with it. The company agreed the charter before the tools were bought.
20 hrs a week
back in the finance team from automated reconciliation.
10
departments adopted the charter.
57%
of the 35 people surveyed already used AI at least a few times a week, with no shared policy behind it.
0
daily users rated themselves very confident.
83%
were open to training.
Approach
What OpenKit set up
The audit was a staff survey followed by a deep-dive session with each department on where AI was already in use and where it worried people. Every department named the parts of its work it considered untouchable.
- A charter in four layers, running from what the company believes and commits to down to how it decides and which tools it uses. It is written in the company’s own language and is specific enough to settle an argument about a piece of work.
- An approved-tools register of what everyone may use and with what kinds of data, with an assessment record a new tool has to pass before anyone puts it to work.
- A managed Claude environment configured to the charter’s data rules, with someone inside the company accountable for how it is used.
- Skills sessions across the teams and an onboarding pack that tells a new starter what AI is and how the house uses it.
- Custom automations for the jobs each department kept losing time to.
- An AI governance forum, chaired by a director, which holds the charter and takes the decisions that keep it current.
The line
What the charter allows and rules out
The charter clears AI for routine administrative work and for first drafts that a person then rewrites. It asks anyone who used AI on a piece of work to say so. It keeps creative work and the house’s own voice with people. Customer data goes only into tools the charter has cleared.
Result
One written position on AI
The charter is short enough that people quote it to each other. All ten departments adopted it and a director is accountable for it at board level.
New joiners meet the onboarding pack before they meet the tools, so nobody has to guess where the boundaries are. Once the rules were settled, OpenKit automated the finance team’s reconciliation work, which gave the team twenty hours a week back.
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