Who should own AI in a company of thirty?
Not IT, not the youngest person, and not a committee. The answer is more specific than most companies expect.
In January this blog said the third decision to make was: one name owns this. Six months on, the question of which name is the one companies get wrong, and the wrong answers are wrong in instructive ways.
The three usual choices, and why they fail
The IT contact. Natural, and wrong for most SMEs. The hard questions here are not technical: which process is worth automating, what may leave the building, who checks the output. An external IT provider has no basis for any of those, and an internal one usually has no mandate.
The youngest employee. Because they are comfortable with the tools. Comfort with tools is the least important qualification, and this arrangement has no authority attached — when a decision needs making, they cannot make it.
A working group. Four people, a monthly meeting, no one accountable. This produces a document and no decisions, and it is how the January page ends up untouched in October.
Who it should be
The person who already owns the company’s processes. In most Swiss SMEs that is the office manager, the head of administration, or the managing director in a firm small enough.
Three reasons this works. They know which processes actually hurt. They have the standing to say no to a colleague and to a vendor. And they are the person a customer’s procurement questionnaire eventually lands on anyway.
The technical help sits underneath them, not above. That is the inversion most companies get backwards.
What the role actually costs
Two hours a month, honestly. Keeping the tool list current, answering « may I use X? », running the quarterly review, and being the name on the page.
It is not a job. It is a hat somebody wears, and the failure mode is not overload — it is that nobody wears it and everyone assumes somebody else does.
The test
Ask three people in your company who they would ask before using a new AI tool with customer data. If you get three different answers, or three shrugs, the role is vacant regardless of what any document says.