How to roll out AI across your team without losing control

Most teams don't fail at AI adoption because the tools are bad. They fail because the rollout happens sideways — one person starts using something on a personal account, then three more follow, and six months later nobody knows what data has gone where or who's paying for what.

The fix isn't to ban it. It's to get ahead of it.

The instinct is to announce AI across every department at once. Resist it. Pick a single repeatable workflow that's already painful — weekly reports, onboarding docs, client summaries — and run it through AI with one small group for a few weeks.

You learn more from one team doing one thing properly than from fifty people experimenting in fifty directions. You also get a clean before-and-after you can point to when you expand.

Before anyone logs in, answer three questions:

Write the answers down somewhere your team can actually find them. A policy nobody has read is the same as no policy.

This is the part most teams skip, and it's the one that causes the real problems later. When people use personal accounts, you have no visibility into usage, no control over permissions, and no way to cut off access when someone leaves.