Carolyn Woodard explores the gap between AI ambition and organizational readiness with Mimi Yeh, Engagement Director at PTKO, a strategy and change management consulting firm that works exclusively with nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. Mimi focuses on the people side of technology adoption — and when it comes to AI, she sees a consistent pattern: leadership is excited, staff are uncertain, and the gap between those two realities is where AI initiatives stall.

The conversation reframes AI adoption not as a tools problem but as an alignment and change management challenge. Mimi and Carolyn discuss how nonprofits can build the internal structure — governance, policy, shared understanding — that makes AI adoption sustainable rather than chaotic, and what funders can do to support that work more effectively.

Mimi and Carolyn discuss:

Why the biggest obstacle to AI adoption in nonprofits is not the technology itself, but the gap between leadership ambition and staff readiness — and how governance can close it.
How to use your organization's existing skepticism about AI (around climate impact, job displacement, or data risk) as a productive starting point for building policy rather than a reason to stall.
Why acceptable use guidelines for AI should not look very different from governance frameworks nonprofits already use for other tools and technologies.
How funders can shift from pressuring nonprofits to adopt AI quickly to supporting the capacity building and literacy that makes adoption meaningful and lasting.
What it actually takes to build an AI tool for internal nonprofit use — and why the human input, voice, and values behind that tool matter as much as the data fed into it.

Resources Mentioned:

PTKO — ptko.io/who-we-are/
AI Acceptable Use Policy Template — Community IT Innovators — communityit.com/template-acceptable-use-of-ai-tools-in-the-nonprofit-workplace/
AI Resource Library — Community IT Innovators — communityit.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/

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