Nine months of this: what a Swiss SME should have done, and what comes next
Since October this blog has covered roughly eighty announcements. Four of them changed what a small company should do. Here they are, and here is the list.
This blog started on 13 October 2024 with three questions: which task exactly, where does the data go, and who checks the output. Nine months and a great many announcements later, those are still the three questions, which is either reassuring or an indictment of how much of the news mattered.
The four things that genuinely changed
Price collapsed. Roughly tenfold for a given capability, in steps rather than smoothly. Three times this blog has had to tell readers to revisit ideas they rejected on cost. That will happen again.
AI stopped being something you choose. It arrived inside software you already owned — the phone in October, SharePoint in November, the operating system by May. The question moved from whether to adopt it to whether you know where it already is.
The plumbing got standardised. One connection protocol, published in November, adopted by every major platform by May. The reason most SME projects never started is becoming a solved problem.
The rules acquired dates. February for the first EU obligations, August for the next. Switzerland chose a lighter path in February and signed in March. None of it is heavy for a normal SME, and all of it rewards one page of written thinking.
What has not changed at all
Your master data is still duplicated. Your quotations are still assembled by hand. The internal time to define a process and check its output is still the largest cost in any AI project, and it has not fallen by a franc while compute fell by ninety per cent.
The companies that got value this year were not the ones with the best tools. They picked one repetitive, well-understood, irritating task and finished it.
The list, one last time
- One page: tools, what may go in, who checks, who to ask, dated.
- One owner: the person who already owns your processes, two hours a month.
- One process: cleaned data, running, measured, before you start the second.
- One rule: the tool drafts, a person decides anything irreversible.
- One habit: fifteen minutes a month, twenty minutes a quarter.
Into the second half
The news will keep arriving at this pace. Most of it will not require you to do anything, and telling the difference is most of the skill.
The test that has held for nine months: does this change which task is worth automating, where our data goes, or who checks the output? If not, it is interesting rather than important, and interesting can wait until the monthly check.