Short answer
A Planning Center AI assistant should help pastors find people context, draft follow-up, prepare ministry work, and queue actions without turning the people database into an unsupervised automation engine.
Decision guide
Use Planning Center as context
The assistant should help staff understand approved people, event, and workflow context without becoming the system of record.
- Lookup recent visitors.
- Find missing follow-up.
- Prepare meeting briefs.
- Draft communications from approved context.
Protect sensitive categories
People data can quickly become pastoral care data. The assistant should avoid counseling content, crisis processing, and specific children summaries.
- Do not process confessional notes.
- Do not classify spiritual status.
- Do not summarize specific children.
- Do not infer sensitive needs from attendance alone.
Queue instead of changing records
The safest v1 workflow prepares drafts and pending actions. Staff review before emails, calendar actions, tags, or updates happen.
- Draft follow-up emails.
- Suggest next steps for review.
- Keep record changes separate from AI output.
- Log approvals and discards.
Evaluation checklist
- 1. Does it read only approved Planning Center context?
- 2. Does it skip counseling and crisis content?
- 3. Does it avoid summaries about specific children?
- 4. Does it queue external actions?
- 5. Does it leave record updates to staff approval?
Related questions
Can Collie work with Planning Center?
Collie is designed around Planning Center-aware workflows such as people lookup, visitor follow-up drafts, and ministry preparation.
Should AI update Planning Center records automatically?
No. AI can prepare suggestions or drafts, but record updates should remain human-approved.