I talk to a lot of nonprofit and public-sector leaders who frame their AI question as a technology decision: "Which AI tools should we use?" That's like asking "Which gym equipment should we buy?" before you've decided what fitness means for your organization.
The tools are the easy part. The hard part is everything else.
The Pattern I Keep Seeing
An organization gets excited about AI. Someone on the leadership team saw a demo, read an article, or attended a conference. They sign up for a tool, maybe assign someone to "figure it out," and wait for the transformation.
Six months later, three people use it regularly, everyone else is doing things the old way, and the license renewal email arrives as a quiet rebuke.
This isn't an AI problem. This is the same pattern that has played out with every significant organizational change since the invention of email. The technology works fine. The adoption didn't.
What Actually Drives Adoption
After fifteen years of facilitating organizational change processes, I've learned that successful adoption depends on three things that have nothing to do with technology:
Clarity of purpose. People adopt new tools when they understand why, not just how. "We're using AI because it's the future" motivates nobody. "We're using AI so our case managers can spend 30% more time with clients instead of doing paperwork" motivates everyone on that team.
Psychological safety. People need to feel safe being bad at something new. In many organizations, admitting you don't understand the technology feels like admitting you're obsolete. Unless leadership explicitly normalizes the learning curve, the people who most need to adopt will be the last to try.
Distributed ownership. Top-down technology mandates generate compliance, not adoption. The organizations that adopt AI successfully involve staff in identifying where it can help — because the people doing the work know better than anyone where the grind is.
The Facilitator's Advantage
Most AI consultants approach adoption as a technical implementation problem: configure the tools, train the staff, measure the usage. That's necessary but insufficient.
What mission-driven organizations actually need is someone who understands both the technology and the human dynamics of adoption. Someone who can facilitate the conversations about what AI means for the organization's mission, identity, and culture — not just its operations.
That's where my background in facilitation meets the AI challenge. The same skills that help a health center board align around a strategic direction can help a library leadership team navigate the tension between innovation and tradition. The same process that surfaces unexpressed fears in a strategic planning retreat can surface the unspoken anxieties about AI that are silently blocking adoption.
Starting Where You Are
If your organization is considering AI, resist the urge to start with tools. Start with questions:
What tasks drain our people's energy and prevent them from doing mission-critical work? (That's where AI goes first.)
What are we afraid might happen if we adopt AI? (Name it, and it loses its power.)
What would we do with the time and energy AI could free up? (This is the real strategic question.)
The answers to these questions will tell you more about your AI readiness than any technology assessment ever could.
Wondering where to start with AI at your organization? Take our AI Readiness Assessment or schedule a conversation — no jargon, no hard sell.