Before asking the team anything new, we start from what you told us in January. Responses are summarized in aggregate only.
Grantee, partner, and staff data concerns came up over and over. Several of your staff refuse to put Echidna documents into AI at all today.
The second theme: accuracy. Today's use is almost all text work; drafting, editing, and summarizing. Almost nobody uses AI for analysis yet — and nobody has touched agents or automations for patterned work.
People really like ChatGPT and use that and Gemini primarily. Any consolidation/change will carry a switching cost.
Many people hold back AI use with deep intention — to protect their own writing, their judgment, the human touch. 3 people raised water and energy use concerns.
| Intent | Practice |
|---|---|
| "We protect confidential data." | AI subscriptions are personal and free. Your Workspace is enterprise — but the AI tools around it (ChatGPT, Grammarly) mostly run on personal / free accounts that Echidna can't control. |
| "Nothing sensitive goes in." | Always-on tools don't ask for permission. Grammarly reads everything typed in where it's applied; Gemini reads emails and docs, and listens to calls, which means sensitive data may be going into AI servers without realizing it. |
| "We all draw the same line." | Everyone's line may be different. Some pay for a subscription because paid plans let them switch off model training on their data. Some never upload anything. Others avoid "confidential info generally". These are different lines. |
Goal: get everyone onto one secure enterprise tool, and deal with the shadow tools — govern them or pull them out.
The clearest thing in the data: comfort and actual use point in opposite directions. Our most confident people use AI least, and two of the three daily users rate themselves lowest.
One person, using AI across ~10 task types every day. Give them stretch material, and lean on them as a peer resource for the team.
Rated 9–10 on comfort, yet use AI only occasionally. They have the skills already. What's missing is a reason and a use case worth their time.
Rated 4–5, yet use AI every day. They feel least equipped while relying on it most. Confidence and guardrails come first for this group.
Most of the team: comfort around 5–8, using AI a few times a week for text work. Ready to move with clear rules and a shared baseline.
And concern tracks inversely with use: the heaviest user ticked the fewest concern boxes; the most-concerned staff use AI least. For roughly a third of the team, the policy is what opens the door to using AI at all. Training gets grouped by quadrant.
The thinnest rows, analysis and automation, are where the later portfolio-analysis and board-prep work will sit. Now we know the size of that gap.
Why people hold back: some worry about confidentiality, some want to protect their own writing and thinking, and some don't trust the output. Clear rules help the first group, shared norms the second, and verification habits the third. The policy needs an answer for each.
The diagnostic is live. Shipped to leadership July 15; results reviewed together July 29. Take the AI Diagnostic →
Prepared by SA Advisory from the January 2026 internal survey (12 responses). Questions → aggarwal.shabnam@gmail.com