AI Compliance When You Have No Legal Team

Every AI compliance guide is written for enterprises. "Engage a cross functional stakeholder group." My cross functional stakeholder group is three people on a Discord call. Here's compliance at a small company. For real. Most of These Laws Probably Don't Apply to You Three questions. That's it. What does your AI do? Does it make or influence consequential decisions like hiring, lending, insurance, healthcare? Or does it summarize text, generate marketing copy, recommend products? The second category is largely unregulated right now. Where are your users? Colorado's law only matters if you have Colorado users. EU AI Act only matters if an EU resident is affected by your system's output. Did you build it or buy it? Are you building the AI model or using someone else's? Different obligations either way. For Silicate, the answer was simple. We track regulations. We don't make decisions about people. Not high risk under any current law. That realization took an afternoon and saved me from building a compliance program I didn't need. Sit down for 30 minutes with every AI feature in your product and answer those three questions. Be specific. "We use AI" is useless.