AI Skill-Building Progression

I've been doing AI trainings for nonprofits and foundations, and I teach AI skill-building as a progression. Here's how I view the stages.

Stage 1: Effective prompting.
Learning HOW to ask AI for what you need. Think: conversational chatbot.

Stage 2: Projects with system prompts.
Building a communications assistant. A grant writing assistant. Think: repeatable workflows that hold your voice, process, context.

For most of my trainings, that is enough. Real change can happen with the first two stages - a return on time investment, less blank page syndrome.

But the progression doesn't stop there.

Stage 3: Agents and context.
AI that doesn't just draft for you, but executes across your systems. Think: an agent drafting a grant report needs the original proposal, the program data, the notes from the last conversation with the program officer.

But agents don't run only on prompts. They run on context — and that context likely lives across separate systems.

So it becomes less about your technical aptitude and more about whether your CRM, your SharePoint, and your spreadsheets can talk to each other.

And it doesn't matter if you are a nonprofit, a foundation, or a corporation - the rules are the same.

Disparate systems will limit what AI agents can do for you. So while it's easy to have AI agent FOMO, understanding the operational backbone required before adopting the shiny new tool can save you a lot of heartache.