The questions every business faces with AI

Seven themes for owners and leadership teams. Each one sets out what good looks like, the questions to ask in your own business and where to read more.

AI strategy for business

An AI strategy for a small or medium-sized business is a short list of choices: which jobs AI should help with first, what it will not be used for, who owns the decision and how you will know it worked. It starts with the work, not with a tool.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which one job, done often and done the same way, would most benefit from AI first?
  • Who in the business owns AI decisions, and how much of their week can they give it?
  • What result would make you continue, change or stop after a month?

AI readiness and results

Readiness is whether the business has what a specific use of AI needs: a clear purpose, permission to use it, an owner, the skills, protection for data and a way of measuring the result. Results are judged job by job against a number taken before AI went in.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which part of your readiness is weakest, given that the weakest part sets the pace?
  • Did you write down how long the job took, and how often it came back for correction, before AI touched it?
  • Where should the time AI saves go, and who decides?

AI governance and risk

Good AI governance in a small business fits on one page. It says which tools are approved, what data must never go into them, who checks the work before it reaches a customer and what to do when something goes wrong. It should make safe use easy, not push use underground.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which AI tools are your staff already using, and which of them have you approved?
  • What customer, client or personal data must never be put into an AI tool?
  • Who checks AI-assisted work before it leaves the business, and how?

AI adoption and change

Adoption is people changing how they do their work, not people having access to a tool. It moves fastest when staff start with the chores they would happily give away, see the hours they save and have a colleague they can ask.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which tasks would your team happily hand to AI, and which are they proud to do themselves?
  • What would show that a new way of working has stuck, rather than that a licence was issued?
  • What is getting in the way: time, confidence, permission or the tools themselves?

AI training and skills

AI training works when it changes what people do on Monday morning. That means practising on their own work, with the approved tools and the business's rules, and coming back to it over several weeks rather than sitting through a single session.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which real tasks will each person practise on during the training?
  • Can your team write a clear brief, the skill underneath good prompting?
  • How will you check, a month later, that the training changed the work?

AI in business operations

AI is most useful in the everyday jobs that keep a business running: sales follow-ups, marketing drafts, customer replies, invoices, rotas and reports. The question for each job is what AI can do, what a person must still check and what must stay with people.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which repeated jobs in sales, service, finance or HR take the most time each week?
  • Where could an AI mistake reach a customer, and who catches it first?
  • Which conversations must always stay with a person?

AI and the future of work

AI changes tasks before it changes job titles. Owners need to decide which tasks to automate, which to support and which to keep as human work, and how new starters will still learn the job when AI does the work they used to learn on.

Questions to ask in your business

  • Which tasks in each role could AI take, and what should those hours go to instead?
  • How will new and junior staff build experience if AI does their first-year work?
  • Which decisions, relationships and judgements must stay with people?