When the customer questionnaire arrives
A larger client sends you a form asking about your use of AI. It will happen this year. Here is how to answer it in half an hour instead of a week.
This is now one of the most common ways European AI rules reach a Swiss SME: not through regulators, but through a customer’s procurement department sending a form.
The 3 February guidance will make these forms more precise over the coming months. Here is how to handle one without it consuming a week.
What they are actually asking
Behind the wording, usually four things. Do you use AI in delivering our work? What happens to our data? Who is responsible if it produces something wrong? And can you tell us which supplier is underneath.
All four are answered by the one-page record from 28 October. If you wrote it in December, this is a copy-and-paste exercise. If you did not, this is the deadline that makes you write it.
The three answers to be careful with
« Do you use AI? » The honest answer is yes, because your email filter and your word processor do. Say so, then say what matters: which tools touch their data specifically. A flat no is almost always untrue and is the kind of untrue that surfaces later.
« Is content AI-generated? » Do not warrant a negative you cannot verify — the 26 September point. Offer instead what you can stand behind: deliverables are reviewed and approved by a named person responsible for their accuracy.
« Are you compliant with the EU AI Act? » The accurate answer for most Swiss SMEs is that the obligations in question apply to providers of high-risk systems and to model providers, that you are neither, and that you follow Swiss data-protection law. Say that plainly rather than claiming a compliance you do not need.
What not to do
Do not overclaim. A procurement questionnaire is a contractual document, and a generous answer written quickly in March becomes a representation you are held to in September.
Do not hire anyone to answer it. At your size the honest answer is short, and a consultant’s version will be longer, more impressive and harder to keep true.
The quiet advantage
Most of your competitors will answer these forms badly — vaguely, or by claiming more than they do. A short, specific, verifiably true answer stands out to the person reading forty of them, and that is a commercial benefit rather than a compliance chore.