What Does It Mean to Be an AI-Driven Nonprofit?

For most of the past year, the bottleneck in my business was me.

Not because my team isn't extraordinary,  it is. But Cloud Nine is built on relationships, and relationships run through people. The judgment calls, the client who needs to hear from me specifically, the strategy that lives in my head between one meeting and the next — none of that scales just because the work doubles. And the work kept doubling.

So at the start of this year, I couldn't shake a question: what would it look like for Cloud Nine to operate as a truly AI-driven organization? Not AI as a gimmick, we mention to sound current. But AI is woven into how we think, how we work, and how we show up for the nonprofits we serve.

That question became what we now call Cloud 9 2.0.

We had to live it before we could lead it

I'll admit I was nervous. We advise mission-driven organizations for a living, and our whole promise is that there's a real person on the other end who knows your work and cares about your community. I had seen AI get this wrong, for example, summaries that missed the heart of what someone said, content that read as if it came from a machine. The last thing I wanted was to trade the soul of our work for a little efficiency.

But I also believe you can't guide someone through something you haven't walked through yourself. So before we ever sat across from a client to talk about AI, we decided to go first.

We brought in AI strategist Tarja Stephens, Founder and Executive AI Advisor at Leaders of the Future, to work alongside our entire team. What I expected to be a single session turned into something much bigger. Tarja sat with us in person, learned how Cloud Nine really runs, and helped us see where AI could carry the weight we'd been carrying by hand. I left those sessions more energized about this business than I'd felt in a long time.

What this looks like in our day-to-day

For us, it didn't start with a grand overhaul. It started with one question: how do we spend less time on the administrative grind and more time on the work only we can do?

The answer was a series of small, intentional shifts. We use tools like Wave and Whisperflow to capture and transcribe our meetings, so nothing slips through the cracks and my team can be fully present in the room instead of buried in note-taking. We use Claude to turn the raw material of our days — the voice memos I record between meetings, scattered notes, long email threads — into structured documents the whole team can use: summaries, process guides, client-ready drafts. Bit by bit, the knowledge that used to live in my head is becoming something we can all build on.

What that buys us isn't just speed. It's time. Less hunting for information, less rebuilding the same report from scratch at the end of every month, and more hours in the conversations and strategy that move a mission forward.

And here's what hasn't changed: every client relationship still begins with a person who knows your work, cares about your community, and is fully present with you. AI didn't replace that. It protected it and gave us more room for it.

What it could look like for you

Most of the nonprofit leaders I talk to aren't asking whether AI matters. They're asking where it fits and whether exploring it means losing the heart of what they do.

That worry is fair. It's the same one I had. And it's exactly where I think the conversation should start.

Done well, AI doesn't replace the relational, mission-driven work at the center of your organization. It clears a path to it, making space for deeper conversations, more proactive thinking, and more time with the people you exist to serve.

That's the version of AI I believe in. And this August, I want to help you find yours.

This summer, Tarja Stephens and I are launching a new 90-minute strategy session built to help leadership teams figure out where AI fits in their organization. Together we'll explore practical applications, surface opportunities for efficiency and growth, and start building a roadmap that aligns with your mission, not against it.

We're opening the waitlist now, and I'd love for you to be among the first organizations to join us.