An AI Tool Adoption Checklist for Small Teams

# An AI Tool Adoption Checklist for Small Teams

Small teams do not need a large procurement department to run a careful AI tool trial. They do need a repeatable way to distinguish a useful experiment from an untracked dependency.

Before the trial

Name an owner and write the task in one sentence. Classify the data the tool will receive as public, internal, personal, confidential, or regulated. Use non-sensitive examples for the first test.

Record the official website, documentation, pricing page, privacy policy, support path, and license when relevant. If a source does not state a detail, keep it unknown.

During the trial

Keep the original inputs and outputs. Measure review time, corrections, failure cases, and the work that remains manual. Test an ordinary case, a difficult case, and an input that should be rejected or escalated.

Do not turn one successful demonstration into a general performance claim. A trial is evidence about the tested workflow, not a universal benchmark.

Before adoption

Confirm access controls, deletion, export, billing units, usage limits, and the fallback process. Write down approved and disallowed use cases, then set a review date.

The NIST AI RMF Playbook provides a public framework for organizing risk questions.