How I Use AI

AI does the gathering, and the judgment is mine

As of November 2026, I work about 32 hours a week, down from 45 to 50 in 2025, and I get roughly eight times as much done as I did five or six years ago. I'm using AI to do a lot of the work faster, and that frees up more time for thinking and exercising judgment, which is what clients actually hire me for. For me, it's AI, but it's high touch: I'm in the loop on everything I send you.

But doing the gathering faster doesn't mean the judgment has been exercised well, so deciding what it all means, and answering for it, stays with me. Jesus is the reason I do this work and the way I try to do it.

What AI does for me

• Research. It finds and reads sources on the question we're working on, and I decide which of them hold up.
• Long documents. My rule is that AI reads the whole document, never a few parts plus guesses, so the first job is finding the right documents and giving it only those.
• Transcription. It transcribes calls and voice messages. I tell you first, and if you'd rather a call not be transcribed, it won't be.
• Keeping track. It organizes what a client has sent, so nothing gets missed between one reply and the next.
• First drafts. It drafts working documents, and nothing it drafts reaches you until I've checked it and made it say what I mean.

What it never does

AI doesn't decide what matters or make the call, and when a call turns out wrong, that's on me, not the tool. It doesn't send email: anything one-to-one from me, I wrote or approved, and scheduled emails, like a welcome series, were written ahead of time. And it never writes my replies in a coaching client's channel.

With consulting clients

Consulting is where the reading piles up: documents, interviews, data, and a hard question that has to be answered from all of it. AI gets me through the pile faster. Deciding what it adds up to, and what I'd recommend, is mine, and so is the name on it.

These are the same tools I use with multi-billion-dollar companies that have strict security requirements, on settings that don't let the providers train on your data. New consulting contracts include an AI rider that names each tool and what it does with your data.

With Groundwork coaching clients

Groundwork runs on messages, and AI helps April and me keep up with them. It transcribes your voice messages, writes me a short brief before I reply, with what you asked and a few resources from our library that might help, and flags a message that might need me sooner. That flag is a convenience, not a crisis service, and How Groundwork coaching works says what to do in an emergency. It's how we can help more people than we could on our own.

It doesn't write the replies. Every coaching reply in your channel is written by April or me, and the brief never drafts one.

Your channel also has a librarian bot, and you'll always know it's a bot. You can ask it what Fieldway has on a topic and talk it through with follow-up questions, and every answer points to Fieldway material. It never gives advice, because that's our job, and I see every question you ask it.

Only April and I read your channel, along with your plus-one if you have one, and none of it is used to train AI. These tools are how the coaching works, so there's no opting out of them, which is why the AI Policy is in front of you before you sign.

Where the details are

This page doesn't name the tools. The AI Policy and the Privacy Policy name the services I use and what each one handles, and the Data Deletion page says how long we keep your data.