The Conversation I Keep Having

By Thomas Tornatore, founder of Fellowship Intelligence, an AI governance & strategy advisory firm.

I have a version of the same conversation on a regular basis.

It starts with a business owner telling me they haven’t adopted AI yet. They’re being cautious, they say. Waiting until they understand it better. They’ve seen what’s happening with other companies and they want to do it right when the time comes.

Then I ask what software their team uses.

Microsoft 365, usually. Sometimes Google Workspace. A CRM. A project management tool. Video conferencing. Maybe an AI phone agent someone purchased because a vendor told them it would save time on calls.

I ask whether Copilot is enabled in their Microsoft environment.

Most of the time, they don’t know.

I ask whether their team is using Gemini features in Google Docs or Gmail.

Usually, they think so. Maybe. The team seems to like some of the new features.

I ask who decided that client communications could flow through those systems.

The conversation gets quiet.

Here is what I have come to understand from these conversations. Most business owners are not avoiding AI. They are running AI they did not choose, on data they did not intend to expose, under terms of service they did not read, through software updates they clicked through without knowing what changed.

They believe they are being cautious because they have not purchased a dedicated AI platform or made a formal AI adoption decision. What they have actually done is let the adoption happen by default, one software subscription at a time.

This is not a criticism. It is the reality of how AI has entered the market. The major software vendors made a business decision to embed AI capabilities into existing products rather than sell them separately. That decision made AI ubiquitous faster than any dedicated AI platform could have. It also meant that billions of people and millions of businesses started using AI without making a choice to do so.

The choice was made for them.

What concerns me about this is not the technology. The technology works. What concerns me is the accountability gap it creates. When an AI system produces an output that influences a decision, and that decision produces a consequence, someone is accountable for it. The software vendor is not accountable. The terms of service are not accountable. The accountability lands on the organization, on the person whose name is on the client relationship or the professional obligation.

If that person did not know AI was involved, they cannot explain the decision. If they cannot explain the decision, they cannot defend it. And in an environment where AI-influenced decisions are beginning to attract regulatory attention, plaintiff interest, and client scrutiny, the inability to explain a decision is not a minor operational gap. It is the exposure.

I write about this because I do not see anyone else writing about it at the level where it actually matters. The AI conversation in most media is either about enterprise deployments at companies most business owners will never work for, or about the existential possibilities of a technology that most people are still trying to understand on a basic level. Neither of those conversations reaches the financial advisor with eight employees who upgraded to Microsoft 365 Business Premium and had no idea Copilot started summarizing their client meetings.

That person is not careless. They are running a business. They trusted that the software they were paying for was working in their interest. They did not know that the update changed what the software was doing, who had access to the outputs, or what the terms now authorized.

They are the person I am writing for.

If you are reading this and you are not certain what AI is running inside your business software right now, that uncertainty is the place to start. Not because something has necessarily gone wrong. But because the first time it matters, you will want to have made the decision yourself rather than discover that someone else made it for you.

That is the conversation I keep having. I write it down here because the people who need it most are not always the ones I get to talk to directly.

If you found this useful, the newsletter goes deeper every week. And if you want to talk through what AI is actually running in your business, schedule an appointment at book.fellowshipintelligence.com/#/thomas