Under 50 people, change the whole company. Above that, start beside it.
The right way to bring AI into a company depends more on its size than on its sector. A small company can change everything at once. A larger one usually cannot, and trying to is how most transformation projects die.
Small companies: change in place
When the founder can name every employee and describe what each one does, there is no layer of the organisation strong enough to resist change. The company itself is the place to experiment. Redesign the whole operation directly: break the work into tasks, move the ones a system can do, and rebuild the processes around what is left.
This is a real advantage. A large competitor needs years to do what a twenty-person company can do in a few months.
Medium and large companies: build beside the core
Once there are layers of management, coordination roles and established ways of doing things, the organisation develops defences. Not out of bad faith: it was built to protect what works today. A project that threatens that will be reviewed, deprioritised and absorbed until nothing is left of it.
The answer is to start beside the core instead of inside it. A small team, reporting directly to the chief executive and funded from the top, takes one process and rebuilds it from scratch around what software can do now. It runs for real customers, proves it does better, and then takes over that process from the old organisation. Then the next one.
Picking the first process
Choose the process with the most coordination and the least judgment: lots of chasing, copying and approving, few genuinely hard calls. That is where a rebuilt process pulls ahead fastest, and where the proof is easiest to see.
If you cannot name everyone in the company and what they do, start beside it.