As AI agents move from experimentation to everyday practice, nonprofit CIOs face a new challenge: understanding how these systems are designed and what that means for strategy, culture, and organizational change. This interactive workshop explores the design patterns that make modern AI systems effective, trustworthy, and scalable inside mission driven organizations. Drawing on real-world examples from nonprofits actively building AI powered tools, the session demystifies concepts like context engineering, skills, and agent orchestration—without requiring deep technical expertise.  

We will help you understand the opportunities in a concrete, principled, and structured way, and pave the way to re-think strategy where the constraints are so different than what they used to be while knowing where the ‘fault-lines’ lie in these tools.  

We will then discuss how Agentic AI will transform organizations, affecting structure, budgeting and staffing, and shifting work to more senior-level tasks. Blending short framing presentations with tablebased discussion, participants will apply these ideas to their own IT teams and organizational contexts. We will consider how to deal with significant divergence across teams and individuals who are fully embracing AI-precipitated change and those who aren’t yet ready. How do CIO’s redirect people’s focus, attention, and energy, leading to cultural change and positioning organizations to think bigger.   

What if you had triple the staff or could split your nonprofit into a second organization; or deploy a full new team quickly. Agentic AI must be thought of in these terms.