Your First Small Company AI Policy
Write a one to two page AI policy your team will actually read and follow
A taste of a lesson
My team uses free chatbots for emails. What is the one rule I should add first?
Start with a data rule, because that is where the real harm sits. Something like: 'Never paste customer names, contact details, order history or payment information into an AI tool that is not on our approved list.' Drafting a polite email from a generic description is low risk. Pasting a customer's complaint thread with their address is not, because free accounts may keep or use what you type, depending on the terms. Quick exercise: think of the last three emails your team drafted with AI. Which of them, if any, would have broken that rule?
Written by the teacher as an example. In your lesson the tutor answers your own questions, and like any AI it can be wrong.
What you will be able to do
- Decide which AI tools your staff may use and how new ones get approved
- Write clear data rules that name what must never go into an AI tool
- Set a human review step for customer facing and financial AI output
- Produce a short policy plus a one page staff summary
- Plan a simple incident response and a yearly review
Lesson plan
- 1 Why a short policy beats no policy Understand what a small company AI policy is for and what it should leave out. Start
- 2 Taking stock of current AI use Find out which tools and tasks your team already uses AI for. Start
- 3 Approved tools and data rules Write the core section on which tools are allowed and what data may go into them. Start
- 4 Human review and accuracy Decide who checks AI output and when, so errors do not reach customers. Start
- 5 Disclosure, ownership and customers Set rules for telling people about AI use and for intellectual property questions. Start
- 6 Incidents, ownership and review Finish the policy with what to do when something goes wrong and how it stays current. Start
Try asking
About this tutor
For owners and managers of companies with roughly two to fifty people who know staff are already using AI tools and want simple, sensible rules. You will not get a legal template. Instead you work through the decisions a policy has to make: which tools are allowed, what data must never go into them, who checks AI output before it reaches a customer, how to disclose AI use, and how the policy gets reviewed. Each lesson ends with a section of your own draft, so by the last lesson you have a short, plain language policy plus a one page summary for staff. The tutor flags where you should ask a lawyer or an accountant before finalising.
Reviews
4.7
3 ratingsSample
- Grace O.Sample
I run a small cleaning company and kept putting this off. We finished with a one and a half page policy and a summary I pinned in the staff chat. The stock taking lesson was eye opening, half my team were using tools I had never heard of.
- Marek P.Sample
Clear and sensible. The data rules section was the most useful part. I wanted more example wording for disclosure to customers, but the tutor was right that it depends on our contracts, so I booked time with our lawyer.
- Hiroko T.Sample
Liked that it never tried to scare me. We tested the summary on our newest hire like it suggested and rewrote two confusing lines.
About the teacher
Practical AI for small businesses, founders and nonprofits with no time and a small budget
9 tutors 431 lessons taught Sample
I work with people who run small organisations: shop owners, solo operators, early founders and nonprofit teams. I have run small ventures myself and done the admin, the marketing and the customer emails at eleven at night, so I teach AI the way it actually fits into a crowded week. We start with the job you hate most, try one...
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