Between mid-2024 and this January, the share of small businesses using AI regularly jumped from 48% to 77%, per Intuit's May report, built on surveys of more than 34,000 small and midsize business owners. I've watched that curve from the inside, on client engagements and in our own workshops.
Here's the question I've started asking owners: "Can you show me your AI policy?"
You have probably seen the clip by now. CEO involvement in AI. Better returns. Simple story. Easy to repost.
That is not wrong. It is just incomplete.
Your staff is already using AI. You probably know that. What you might not know is which tools, on which data, with what guardrails.
The 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report put a number on it: 92% of nonprofits are using AI in some capacity. But 47% have no governance policy at all. And 81% are using AI individually, no shared workflows, no documentation, no organizational learning.
That's not an AI problem. That's a risk management problem hiding in plain sight.
And they're not doing anything wrong — that's the scary part.
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