National AI policy is being written right now. Small firms aren’t in the room, and they’re the ones who’ll carry the cost.
In a companion piece I argued that resistance to AI, your own team’s included, is not technophobia but a response to unfairness: work taken without consent, shared resources spent at industrial scale, livelihoods risked for a benefit most people cannot see. That piece looked at the problem from inside the business. Pull back to the questions underneath it, and three decide everything: who is AI for, who pays for it, and who gets to decide. The answer is being settled right now, in national policy, and the businesses it will squeeze hardest, the small ones, are not at the table.
