Navigating the AI Moment: Staying True to Who We Are While Staying Current
When did this thing become such a fixture in our lives? One minute it was a curiosity, the next it quietly infiltrated our daily workstreams, creative processes, and conversations. Artificial Intelligence isn’t on the horizon. It’s here. The real question now is, What do we do with it?
At ABW Partners, we approach this new landscape not as experts proclaiming certainty, but as observers, learners, and experimenters. Like many of our clients, we have more questions than answers. But we believe curiosity and responsible exploration are the right place to start.
Staying Current, Staying Curious
In our work, staying fresh and current is essential. We can’t do that without acknowledging AI’s growing role in nearly every field. Yet, while AI feels omnipresent, people are still surprisingly quiet, or even sheepish, about how they use it.
Increasingly, the new icebreaker in professional spaces is: “Do you use AI?” And everyone wants to know how everyone else is approaching it.
We’ve seen this curiosity surface across our client work. AI sneaks into coaching conversations. It comes up in board retreats. We’ve even been asked in strategic planning reports for our firm’s point of view on the topic, and it’s a perfectly valid question.
Our answer is that we are intrigued and paying close attention. We’re experimenting. We’re figuring it out as we go, but always guided by our true north: leveraging strategic acumen and staying grounded in our firm’s mission and values.
Our Values-Based Approach to AI
We believe in using AI responsibly, with clear boundaries. Our work is fundamentally relational. It’s built on trust, emotional intelligence, and decades of strategic expertise. No tool, no matter how advanced, can replace the human nuances that make our work meaningful and effective.
Strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and organizational development all require deep listening, empathy, and the ability to read the unspoken. AI can help us speed up certain processes, but it can’t replicate the art of understanding people and systems in motion.
So, when it comes to our client work, we keep AI at the edges. This is how that looks:
When we’re forming early hypotheses during the intake or immersion phase, we rely solely on our own acumen and experience, not AI-generated insights.
Later in the process, we might use AI to tighten the way a question is phrased, helping us get more precise in our thinking or presentation.
When reviewing large sets of stakeholder input, we may use AI to surface emerging themes, but always verify those findings against our own understanding and intuition.
When crafting deliverables, we sometimes use AI to help us refine or condense our communications, never to replace our analysis or conclusions.
AI helps us move faster and more efficiently, but the thinking, interpreting, and connecting remain deeply human.
What AI Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Do
There are core aspects of our work that AI simply cannot touch.
It cannot sit across from a nonprofit leader and sense the hesitation behind their words. It cannot feel the pulse of a room in the middle of a tough facilitation session. It cannot build trust or be the “outsider-insider” that our clients have come to rely on.
Those moments, the ones that shape real organizational growth, are inherently human. They require emotional intelligence, empathy, and judgment. They are the reasons we do this work, and they are the reasons AI will never replace it.
Moving Forward With Intention
At ABW Partners, we see AI as a helpful addition to our toolkit. It enhances, refines, and speeds things up so we can do more of what truly matters. But just as with any tool, its impact depends on how thoughtfully it’s used.
We remain committed to our values: curiosity, integrity, collaboration, and excellence.
This means being authentic while engaging with the innovations that shape our field. It means continuing to ask: How do we stay true to ourselves and our clients while serving them in even more effective, forward-thinking ways?
The answer, as always, lies in balance.
Embracing the new without abandoning what makes us human.
