AI Business Resilience

When we talk about AI at work, we talk about speed and efficiency. We rarely talk about the moment the tool stops, gives a wrong answer or is withdrawn by its provider, and we hardly ever talk about the people who use it every day. The guideline AI Business Resilience, written by Jan Smolka and Kamila Kempná, addresses exactly that. It is a practical document for owners, team leaders and managers; no specialist knowledge is needed.

Looking at processes before AI fails
The guideline asks the organisation to look at its processes before a failure, not after. The more work AI takes over, the more an organisation loses on the day it fails. A third-party tool also becomes part of the process and can be very hard to replace in a hurry. The method follows five steps: list where AI is used, rate how long the work can wait and how much people could do by hand, prepare a fallback, respond and recover, and review every year.

One number: the outage equivalent
The key figure is the outage equivalent: how many people are missing on the day the tool fails. In the fictitious example of the guideline, a logistics firm with 60 employees loses the work of 12 people, 20% of its staff, in one morning. Naming two people who practise the manual steps reduces the gap to 10.

What goes into which tool
The guideline also sets simple rules for information. It sorts information into four classes, from public to strictly confidential, and states which class may enter which kind of tool. In 2023, for example, Samsung barred staff of a large division from using generative AI tools on company devices after employees had entered internal source code into ChatGPT.
Everyone who has an AI tool at their disposal should be trained before first use and once a year, because dependence on AI, wrong outputs and information leaks are emerging risks for which most employees have not been trained.

Key content
• Five steps and a rating matrix (levels R1 to R4)
• Printable forms: checklist, continuity plan, incident record, register and rating worksheet
• A one-page leaflet for awareness work
• A worked example, a list of reported incidents and statistics with sources
• 30 pages, English edition; a Czech edition follows

Comments welcome
The guideline is a draft. The authors would like to hear where it would not work in your organisation, and which parts need to be clearer or more detailed. The draft guideline and the leaflet are available at https://www.majaczech.cz/ai-business-resilience/.

Text prepared with the help of AI and reviewed by the authors.