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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