Systems Run the Work: AI Workflows
We think of AI as an overeager intern. Give it a clear job with clear limits and it gives your team hours back. Give it neither and it just makes new messes faster.
The Pattern.
On most teams, staff are already using AI on their own personal accounts. Nobody has said what is safe to put in it, so meeting notes, donor notes and drafts are moving through tools the organization does not control. People are curious, a little nervous and getting different answers from different tools.
What we Take Out FirSt.
First we get donor data out of personal accounts. Then we stop the one-off experiments that nobody can repeat. We set one simple rule your whole team can remember: if it would not go in the donor record, it does not go into AI.
What we build
- An AI use standard your team can follow, written in plain words
- Team accounts in place of personal ones
- Two or three workflows that take real work off a real person, like meeting notes that become tasks
- Training for the people who will run those workflows
Start with the one job that eats someone’s week and let AI take that off their plate first.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivid Operational Advisors. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivid around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
