When AI Meets Your Values
It feels like you can’t go anywhere without someone wanting to share their hot take on AI. And with recent warnings from Anthropic CEO about the potential of autonomous AI agents taking over the internet, the AI conversation is hitting a fever pitch. At the breakneck speed of adoption and headlines stoking fear, it’s difficult to parse a strong, and ethical approach to AI adoption for an organization. So how do you know what to trust or where to start? And when do you share what you’ve learned? Our early motivations to answer these questions were driven by this duality of fear and service: fear about how this emerging technology could drastically transform the way clients see the value of our work and how to best serve our communities and clients by being on the early side of AI fluency, understanding, and adoption where appropriate
In this next Kinetic Signals series, Kinetic West will be wading into the fray. In closely tracking the ways AI is reshaping education, workforce development, and economic development, we’re helping our clients navigate these changes. But before we go there, we want to pull back the curtain on how Kinetic West is thinking about a values-centered approach to using AI. We believe the more transparent we are about how we’re tackling the challenges and opportunities of technological transformation, the better equipped we are to responsibly navigate it collectively. Our hope is that this can help inform how your organization makes decisions around AI adoption.
The Why: Our values and AI
Kinetic West is a values-driven organization. Our values are a lens through which we make decisions: they ground us when we choose what work to pursue, how to approach partnership, and what system design should look like. They also help us when we think about how we want to approach AI. As a small and tightly aligned firm, we are more agile than many of the organizations we serve, and we knew that AI adoption was one way to help catalyze work for our clients. So, in the midst of much talk about how AI would eliminate the need for consultants like us, we started to dive in.
At the same time, we didn’t want to be naïve. AI is a technology. And technology encourages us to behave in different ways. AI is changing the way we relate to the written word, to our own writing, to the pace of work, to what is considered difficult and easy to produce. And maybe some of this is ok. But as a team, we did not want to just accept AI at face value. Through ongoing conversations culminating in a half day equity session, we asked ourselves how AI does and does not intersect with our values. Where does it reinforce our values of getting started and getting better? Does it live in tension with our value of wholeheartedness and interconnectedness? Can AI be used to help dismantle systemic racism; in what ways does it re-enforce white supremacy cultural norms?
Values are not a Magic-8 Ball. They don’t tell you “yes,” “no,” or “ask again later.” But they do help you navigate nuances and challenges together. Individuals in our firm have a range of optimism and pessimism about AI. Collectively, we are concerned about the ways that AI can disconnect us from the deep, detailed parts of our work, how reliance on AI is putting pressure on an already constrained electrical grid, and how AI is disrupting the workforce and reshaping the work our clients find most valuable. We also see potential for AI to help us better visualize and communicate our work, to help create demand for abundant, affordable, renewable energy, and to reshape our economy in a way that shifts value toward more accessible, human-centered skills and jobs. Some of us feel the concerns more strongly and others of us see the opportunities more clearly, but we are aiming to navigate it all together.
One thing is clear: we feel deeply responsible to our clients and our work, and we have clear guidance that prevents AI slop – or even convincing but hollow AI outputs – to creep into our thinking and deliverables. We’re committed to using AI to help make repetitive parts of our job more efficient, to get up to speed more quickly, and to help us be more iterative, deeper thinkers and collaborators.
The What: How we’ve approached AI adoption at Kinetic West
So what has our journey looked like at Kinetic West so far?
In 2025, an internal advisory group at Kinetic West developed our first draft of AI usage guidance and created standard language about AI usage that goes in our contracts.
A pilot group started using a single AI tool in May of 2025 and the full team adopted that tool in November 2025. Before the full team adopted the tool, individuals used the tools they preferred – this is still allowed, but we knew that if we wanted each team member to achieve a baseline of AI fluency, the firm needed to invest in a shared tool.
In early 2026, we hired a trainer who walked our team through six sessions on AI. After the official training sessions were complete, we instituted a regular cadence of team sharing about best practices, learnings, and challenges that people run into in their use of AI.
Along the way, we continued to update our policy as the technology advanced and have deployed small teams to leverage AI to do our repeatable work more effectively.
The How: From values to working norms
It’s important to dig into the nuance of values and what they mean when it comes to the application of AI. But that doesn’t eliminate friction. As we adopted AI, experimenting with different ways to use it, it started to change the way we work together. Our approach is to allow individuals the autonomy to use AI in the way the best supports their process and way of working – and we stand by this approach – but that’s not to say it’s without challenges.
Because AI can help iterate more quickly, it requires deeper and more careful reviews of outputs. But who is responsible for that deeper review, and at what point in the process? A few months after our equity session on AI and values, we had a working agreements session. During this session, we asked for honest feedback about how AI creates friction in the way we work.
We heard things like:
I feel friction when I can tell that things are written by AI - even when it's right.
Comments like, ‘I don't use AI for this’ or ‘I do use AI for this’ feel like a judgement from teammates about how I use it.
It is hard to track down where an error is coming from – a human error or an AI error.
My approach to feedback is different when I know something is AI-generated vs. human-generated. Not knowing makes it difficult to calibrate my feedback.
Now, the team is developing a set of working agreements around AI. This is not a policy that goes in our handbook, but a set of agreed-upon norms that will accompany our AI use guidance and help reduce friction. They’re in development, but the themes anchoring them include:
Asking about AI use from a place of curiosity, not judgement
Setting expectations for factchecking and review of AI produced content, naming who is responsible for deep review
Being forthcoming and disclosing when AI is used in our work to help teammates learn and understand how to provide effective feedback
Proactively ensuring we are maintaining high-quality standards in our work where AI is involved (from our team, or from clients)
Allowing for individual agency to use AI differently based on our individual work styles – mandated AI usage should be rare
Continuing to make space for AI questions, ideas, and lessons learned that others on the team may benefit from
Encouraging experimentation with new AI tools, but setting expectations that our team will spend time strengthening proficiency in our existing tools
Our AI adoption, usage, policies, and agreements will continue to evolve. And we hope that’s true for all organizations. We can’t get stuck in the past based on fear of what new tech will bring, but we also can’t blindly adopt new technologies without considering how they will impact us and our communities.
In this upcoming Kinetic Signals series, we want to bring you into how we’re thinking deeply about the influence of AI and share how we’re seeing its impact across our key sectors:
Workforce development: How is AI impacting career trajectories nationwide?
Education: How can we support Washington school districts with intentional adoption of AI and maintain students at the center?
Economic development: How might we envision an equitable and inclusive Seattle economy with the growing AI economy?
In the meantime, if you want to talk more about how your organization is (or is not) using AI and the lessons learned along the way, please reach out.
