Insights
Every beach has rules: what good AI governance looks like in a small or mid-sized company.
Good AI governance isn't a binder or a committee. It's a named owner, a one-page set of rules, a habit of checking, and a plan for when something goes wrong.
Say "governance" to a room of owners and the room cools off. People picture binders, committees, and a process slower than the work. Good AI governance is the opposite: the minimum structure that keeps AI useful and keeps leadership from shelving it the first time it gets a detail wrong.
Who owns it
Someone has to own AI the way someone owns safety or cash. It might be the owner, an operations lead, or whoever already owns process. The title doesn't matter. The name does. When someone wants to try a new use, or something goes wrong, one person decides. Access without ownership is how you get experiments everywhere and accountability nowhere.
What's allowed
Write it on one page in plain language: what's fine, what needs a check, and what's off-limits for now. Drafting an internal note is different from drafting something that goes to a customer. Looking up a general idea is different from putting company numbers into a public tool. Update the page as you learn. If people have to guess, they'll either avoid AI or use it in ways that create risk.
Checking outputs
Hallucination isn't a rare glitch. It's known behavior, so build the check into the work and match the control to the risk. Anything that commits the company, like a bid, a customer email, or a number that drives a decision, gets a human review before it goes. Internal drafts and summaries can move faster. It's the same discipline you use with a new hire writing quotes: you don't ban quoting, you review it until trust is earned.
When something goes wrong
Have the answer ready before you need it: pause the use, fix the output path, update the rules if needed, and restart when the owner says so. Companies without that playbook freeze the whole AI effort over one bad day. Companies with it treat a bad output like any other process miss: serious, fixable, and not a reason to quit.
Where it fits
In the Three Ts, Test the Water finds where AI fits and where a wrong answer would hurt, then tries one use with a human check built in. Tune adjusts it until the numbers hold up. Take Off rolls it out with the same controls, so growth doesn't recreate the "nobody owns it" problem.