If you don’t have an AI policy, it’s tempting to assume your team isn’t using AI. The truth is almost always the opposite. Your team is using AI right now. The only question is whether anyone is paying attention to how.
The Three Doors AI Walks Through
AI comes into an organization through three different doors, and only one of them is easy to see.
The front door is the obvious one. Someone signs up for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and it shows up on a credit card statement. This is the AI leaders think about when they think about AI at all, and it’s easiest to govern because it’s visible.
The side door is harder. Most of the tools your team already uses, Canva, StreamYard, Riverside, and dozens of others, have quietly built AI into their features. A team member might swear they don’t use AI while relying on AI-powered background removal, transcription, or editing tools every single day. A policy that only names the big chatbots misses this entirely.
The back door is the hardest of all. The platforms your ministry depends on to reach people, Meta, YouTube, TikTok, are themselves governed by AI systems that decide what gets seen and by whom. Most leaders never think of algorithmic reach as an AI issue, yet it shapes ministry impact more than almost anything else on this list.
Why Banning it Doesn’t Work
A natural response to all this is to try to shut it down. In practice, that doesn’t work, and it often backfires.
Here’s why: people tend to get stuck in one of two postures around AI at work. Some hide how much they’re using it because they’re worried it will make them look replaceable. Others avoid using it, even when leadership asks them to, for the exact same reason. Either way, the result is the same: a team quietly doing its own thing while leadership has no visibility into any of it.
The way out is creating permission and a safe space to experiment, and doing it with authenticity. A leader who says “use this tool” but privately admits they’re scared of it themselves isn’t going to get buy-in. Modeling comfortable, transparent use matters more than any written policy.
Where to Start
If this is the first time you’ve thought about AI in terms of governance rather than just tools, here’s a reasonable starting point:
- Name all three doors. Take an honest inventory of what your team is actually using, not just what’s been officially approved.
- Educate before you regulate. Get your leadership team hands-on with the tools themselves before writing policy about them.
- Define the role AI should play, based on your actual objectives, not a generic template borrowed from another organization.
- Build in review points. AI capability is changing quickly enough that a policy written today may need revisiting in six months.
This is exactly the kind of work Dunham+Co helps ministries and nonprofits think through, not as an IT exercise, but as a leadership and culture question.