What to write down before December
Not a policy. A single page that answers the four questions somebody will ask you in the next twelve months, while you still remember the answers.
Between now and the end of the year, one useful hour: write down what your company decided about AI this year, while the reasoning is still fresh. Four questions, one page, and it never needs to be read again unless somebody asks.
The people who will ask are, in rough order of likelihood: a customer’s procurement department, your auditor, an insurer, and a new employee.
Question one: what do we use?
The list from the 19 September inventory, with the model provider behind each one where you know it. Dated.
Question two: what may go into it?
Two or three concrete examples of what must not, drawn from your business. This is the paragraph from 11 August and it is the one most likely to be asked for verbatim.
Question three: who decided, and what did they decide?
The name from 8 September, plus the two or three decisions actually made this year: which tools, which settings you turned off and why, which supplier questions you asked.
The « why » matters more than the decision. In eighteen months somebody will find a setting switched off and want to know whether it was deliberate.
Question four: what did we check?
The supplier documentation links from 4 August. The date of the account review. Whether the contract clause question from 26 September has come up yet.
What this is not
It is not an AI policy, not a compliance framework, and not something to send to a consultant. It is the answer sheet for questions you will otherwise reconstruct from memory in a hurry, and reconstruction under time pressure is where companies overstate what they do.
One page, one hour, and file it where next year’s version can be written underneath it. If you do only one item from this blog’s past year, this one preserves all the others.