Practical, evidence-based guidance from Dan Fitzpatrick on how small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI well: strategy, training, governance and getting real work done.
34 articles
Family firms adopt AI faster than they decide who answers for it. Here is a rule for splitting owner decisions from manager decisions, a decision rights sheet you can copy, and a worked example for a hypothetical 40-person firm.
A business AI audience is split between firms already using AI and firms that have not started. Here is how to choose a keynote speaker who gives both halves a next step: five questions to ask, which kind of speaker suits which slot, and a one-page brief you can copy.
A complete AI use policy for a UK small business, free to copy and issue this week: nine clauses in full wording, the four choices only you can make, and what UK law actually requires behind each one.
The law makes small businesses disclose AI in only a few places. Customers expect more. The Surprise Test shows when to tell them up front and when a website statement is enough, with copyable wording for your site, proposals, chatbot and note-taker.
New hires use AI from their first morning, often with habits formed under another employer's rules. Here is a one-month plan, the Three Firsts, that gives a starter your rules on day one, your way of working in week one and an AI job of their own by day thirty.
AI can chase invoices, sort receipts and explain your numbers, but it should never set a figure in your books, move money or change who gets paid on its own. Here is where to draw the line, and what to do this week.
The Digital Omnibus pushed the EU AI Act's high-risk rules to December 2027 and softened the AI literacy duty. Here is what the Act still asks of a small business, and a simple way to sort every AI use you have onto one of four shelves.
Most small businesses will start the new year with AI in their people's browser tabs and nowhere in their plan. Here is what a one-page AI plan should hold, and the test every line must pass before it goes in.
AI now does much of the work trainees used to learn on, and entry-level hiring is falling fastest where AI is most capable. Here is why most small businesses should keep hiring juniors, and how to rebuild the role around the job AI cannot do.
Most businesses using AI cannot say whether it is working, because nobody wrote down a before number. Here is a simple way to measure AI job by job: time, corrections, and where the saved hours go.
Prompting is a job skill, but underneath it is the old skill of giving a clear brief. Here is the New Hire Test, what the research says, and a practical way to teach prompting to a small business team in a month.
Give AI the work around the sales conversation, not the conversation itself. Four jobs to start with, what stays with people, and the Receipt Rule that keeps every claim you publish true.
