I started using ChatGPT when it launched in November 2022. I wasn’t chasing a trend. I was running a nonprofit with no executive team, so I did the work of several people, and I needed help.

The first thing I decided was what the tools would never see. The people we served trusted us with real information about their lives. None of it would go into an AI tool. Not names, not details, not “just this once.” That rule came before any workflow.

With the rule in place, AI changed what I could do. I could tell the stories of the people we served and reach more people without exposing who they were.

It changed grants most of all. I used to write grants that went through at least ten revisions, with people giving different input at different times, over weeks. I flipped the process. I got all the input up front. I did the thinking up front. Then I filled in the sections using systems I’d built. In my own work, what took weeks took days, and I met deadlines I might have missed.

I started with ChatGPT and Claude, and over time I worked with Gemini and Perplexity too. Later we built our own internal systems that used those models. Because I was the one signing us up, I was also the one checking that each service met our requirements. That is where I really learned AI governance: by being responsible for it.

Some people were uneasy about my using AI. I understood that. My answer was always to show how it was used, what stayed out, and who checked the work.

I’ll be honest about the limits. The tools are fast and confident, and sometimes wrong. If you’re small and stretched thin, the trap is trusting something just because it sounds sure of itself. Every draft still needed a person to read it, fix it and stand behind it.

If you’re starting out:

• Decide what never goes in before you use anything.
• Pick one task, like a grant report or a newsletter, and try it for a month.
• Keep a simple log of what you used the tool for and who checked the result.

I built a free AI use log for exactly that. The vendor review checklist and the staff guide on my Resources page are good places to start too. If you’d rather sit down and sort it out together, I do that: request an assessment. And tell me what you’re running into, in general terms and without names or details about anyone you serve, through the contact page.

General education, not legal advice. Jackson Allen LLC is not a law firm.