What is AI governance, and does a business our size need it?
It is the shared setup that decides how your people use AI: which tools, what information goes into them, and the house rules every session follows. If anyone on your team uses ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or Claude for work, AI is already in your business; governance makes everyone's use consistent and in line with how the company wants the work done, with safety built in rather than left to each person. For a small business it is a practical, scoped piece of work, not a compliance department.
Our team already uses ChatGPT or Copilot. Do we have to stop?
Usually not. The aim is to get more from the tools your people already rely on, used the same way across the team, not to ban them. Where a tool or a habit is putting client data at risk, we say so plainly and set up a safer way to do the same job.
What is an AI agent, and how is it different from automation?
An automation runs one process the same way every time: a reminder goes out, a document gets filed. An agent owns a role. It works through the week on its own, makes the routine calls you have authorized, and brings you the ones that need a person, with a full record of what it did and why. Most businesses end up with a mix of both.
What happens to our data?
The shared setup spells out which information may go into which AI tools, so that question stops being left to each person. Agents run in an environment dedicated to your business, and every automated action is logged so it can be reviewed after the fact. When we host an agent, its AI model calls run through Google Cloud, whose terms bar Google from using your data to train its models. We document where your data goes so you can answer that question for your own clients.
What does it cost?
Governance is a fixed price, quoted in your written scope after the first conversation, with an optional periodic review afterwards as your tools and the rules change. A build is a fixed price too. If we host it, you then pay a monthly fee for hosting and maintenance, plus the AI model usage it runs on, billed monthly. If we hand it over, it runs in your own cloud account and the cloud and model bills come to you directly.