Your customers have started asking: the AI section of supplier questionnaires
Since February, procurement forms from larger customers have grown a new block. Here is what it asks and how to answer it in fifteen minutes.
If you supply larger companies, particularly in the EU, you may already have seen it: the supplier questionnaire that used to ask about ISO certification and data protection now has three or four questions about artificial intelligence.
This is the AI Act arriving at your door indirectly. Your customer has obligations, or expects to, and is pushing the question down the chain. It is not going away, and answering it badly is a commercial problem rather than a legal one.
What they actually ask
Do you use AI in delivering services to us? A yes-or-no that most companies answer wrongly, because they think of AI as a product they bought rather than a feature inside tools they already use. If your mail client summarises, your translation is machine-assisted, or your quotations are drafted with help, the answer is yes.
Where is the data processed? Country and legal basis. The same answer you wrote down after the November post about transfer bases.
Is our data used for training? The answer needs to be no, and you need to be able to point at where your vendor says so.
Do you have a policy? This is where the one page earns its keep.
How to answer well
Answer yes to the first question and be specific about what. « No » from a company that obviously uses ordinary office software reads as either careless or evasive, and a procurement officer who has read twenty of these will notice.
Attach the page. One dated page describing your rules is a better answer than three paragraphs of prose, and it is the artefact they are actually looking for.
Where something is not yet settled, say so with a date. « Under review, next revision July 2025 » is a credible answer. Silence is not.
Why this is the real deadline
For most Swiss SMEs, no authority will ever ask about AI governance. A customer will, and they will ask this year, and the answer will sit in a file that affects whether you stay on a supplier list.
That is a more concrete reason to keep the page current than any regulation, and it is the argument worth making internally when someone asks why this matters.