Human approval for small businesses
Human approval is a named person agreeing to a specific output before it has an effect. The useful version is narrow: approval on anything that reaches a customer, moves money, changes a price, or commits the organisation to something. Everything else runs without a gate, which is what keeps approval meaningful rather than ceremonial.
( The Detail )
What this control means in practice
Write down who approves what, what they are actually checking for, and what happens when they are on leave. An approval step nobody can describe is a delay, not a control. A fair check is whether the approver has ever rejected anything; if not, the gate is probably being waved through.
Realistic for this kind of team
A small business has no compliance function, so governance sits with the owner or with whoever happens to be good with software. The realistic controls are few and cheap: an approved tool list, a rule about customer information, and one person who decides when something new is allowed in.
Obligations do not scale down with headcount. Personal information collected from customers is still personal information, and Australian privacy expectations still apply. The cheapest response is to limit how much of it goes near AI tools at all, rather than building controls for data you never needed to share.
How to approach it
Begin with the decision rather than the tool. Name the recurring judgement this affects, the information it depends on, and the person accountable for acting on the result. That framing keeps the first build small enough to inspect and useful enough to matter.
Keep a human review point in the loop until the quality and the failure modes are understood. A system that shows its working - what it drew on, where it is uncertain, and what it deliberately left alone - is one a business can keep running after the initial build.
( Next Step )
Start small enough to review, but on a workflow important enough to show whether a better system is worth building.