AI Governance Doesn’t Need a 40-Page Policy Doc. Here’s What Actually Matters.

“AI governance framework” pulls close to 3,000 searches a month, and most of what ranks for it is written for a Fortune 500 compliance department with a dedicated AI ethics officer. If you’re running a business in Denver, Boulder, or Golden with 5, 20, or 100 employees, that content is useless to you: not wrong, just built for a company ten times your size. Here’s what governance actually looks like at your scale. Governance Isn’t a Document. It’s Four Questions You Can Actually Answer. I’ve read the big-company frameworks. They’re thorough, and they’re also 40 pages of stuff nobody at a 30-person company is going to read, let alone follow. Strip it down and what’s actually load-bearing is four questions: What are we using AI for, specifically? Not “AI” as a category; the actual list of tasks. Drafting emails is different from making a hiring decision is different from answering customer support tickets. Each one carries a different level of risk. What data does it touch? This is the…