The first week back, and the one conversation to have
Whatever you plan for this year, it is blocked on a decision most Swiss SMEs have still not made. It takes one meeting and one sentence.
The office is open again and the year’s plans are being written. Before any of them, one thing: decide who owns AI decisions in your company, and say so out loud.
This blog made that argument on 8 September and repeated it in December, and it remains the single recommendation with the most leverage, because everything else assumes it.
Why it keeps not happening
Because it does not feel urgent, and because it sits between departments. IT does not want a business question, operations does not want a technical one, and the managing director has eleven other things.
So it gets discussed in March, discussed again in June, and by September everyone is slightly tired of the subject and nothing has moved. We have now watched that cycle run twice while writing this blog.
The sentence
Something like: Anna decides which tools we use and what may go into them. Spending above two thousand francs a year comes to me. Everything else is hers.
Not a policy document, not a committee, not a role description. A sentence said in a meeting in the first week of January, when the year is still open enough to absorb it.
What it unlocks immediately
Four things this blog has recommended and that nobody can do without it. Answering a colleague who asks for a tool. Turning a setting off. Asking a supplier a question. Deciding whether the twenty examples get tested this month.
All four are small. All four require somebody to be allowed to decide alone.
And the honest version for the smallest companies
If you are eight people and the owner decides everything, you already have this and can skip it. The gap is specific to companies of roughly twenty to eighty, where the owner no longer decides everything but no structure has replaced them.
If that is you, this week is the cheapest moment of the year to fix it.