What Tribal Boards Should Ask Before Approving an AI Project

Most AI proposals that come in front of a tribal council or non-profit board are sold by people who have never sat in one of those meetings. Their slides talk about saving money and growing big. The slides don’t talk about sovereignty, where your information lives, what happens to your member records if the company gets bought out, or whether your staff actually wants the tool.

This is a list of questions board members and council members should be asking. Print it out, bring it into the meeting, and use it. Eight questions, grouped by topic. The right answer to most of them is "we don’t know yet — get us those answers and come back."

On the problem

1. What's the specific problem this AI tool will solve, in one sentence?

If the answer is "use AI to grow our membership / our donor base / our followers by 5x" — that's a vendor pitch, not a problem definition. Push back. Ask for a sentence about a specific question the staff currently answers manually, or a specific report that takes too long, or a specific bottleneck the team feels every week.

If the proposer can't answer this in one sentence, the project is not ready for board approval.

2. What does the staff who currently does this work say about the proposal?

Ask the membership manager. Ask the program director. Ask the cultural center coordinator. AI projects that get approved over the heads of the staff who'll use them are the AI projects that fail.

If the staff is uncomfortable, find out why. Sometimes it's resistance to change (workable). Sometimes it's a real concern about the work being misrepresented (a stop signal).

On data and sovereignty

3. Where will our information live, and who else can see it?

This is where most outside AI companies fail. Tribes are sovereign nations. Your member records, your enrollment information, your cultural records — these have rules that a typical cloud setup might not respect.

Things to specifically ask:

• Will the AI company use our information to improve their own tools? (Usually yes, unless you stop them — read the fine print.)
• How long does our information stay in their system?
• If the company gets bought by someone else, what happens to our information?
• Do we have a written agreement about how they handle our data?

4. What if we want to leave?

Getting stuck with a company is a real risk. Ask before you sign anything:

• Can we get all our information back in a standard format?
• How long does that take?
• What happens to anything we’ve customized — do we keep it, or does the company keep it?

On cost and decision-making

5. What does this actually cost over five years, not just the first year?

The pitch usually shows the first-year price. The reality is an AI tool comes with:

• A yearly fee (which often goes up each year)
• Staff time to keep it running
• Moving costs when the company changes direction or stops supporting the tool

Ask for a five-year cost estimate. If they can’t give you one, ask why.

6. What's the smallest version we could try in 30 days?

This is the "are you actually serious?" question. People who can’t describe a small first version usually haven’t really thought it through. Real proposals can describe the smallest useful thing that could be done in a month.

If the answer is "we need six months and $300,000 just to get set up before anything is ready" — that’s a different kind of project, and it deserves a lot more questions.

On governance and reversibility

7. Who decides what this tool does and doesn’t do?

When the AI starts producing reports or messages, who reviews them before they go to members or the public? Who can change how it works? Who decides what kinds of information are off-limits (sacred places, ceremonial photos, enrollment records)?

If the answer is "the company handles all of that" — the project doesn’t have proper oversight.

8. How do we turn this off if it’s not working?

Sometimes AI tools give wrong answers but sound confident about it. Sometimes they cause unexpected staff stress. Sometimes things change so quickly that what made sense last year doesn’t make sense this year.

The project needs a clear plan for shutting the tool off, telling staff and members about it, and getting back anything useful you created. If there’s no plan to stop, that’s a warning sign.

A few questions that sound smart but aren’t useful

In our experience, these sound careful but don’t actually help:

• "Is this AI tool secure?" — every company will say yes. The real security questions are #3 and #4 above.
• "Can it handle our size?" — most tribal organizations aren’t big enough for this to matter. It’s usually a way to avoid the real cost question.
• "How accurate is the AI?" — there isn’t one number that answers this. Any company that quotes one is just selling. Ask about specific things that could go wrong instead.
• "How does it compare to ChatGPT or Claude?" — which AI is used behind the scenes is a small detail. The question is whether the tool solves your problem.

What a good pitch looks like

If a company or consultant comes to your board with this kind of information, take them seriously:

1. The specific problem they’re solving, in one sentence
2. What they’ll deliver and when (the first version should be in under two months)
3. What it costs upfront and ongoing, with a five-year estimate
4. Where your information will live, and how you can leave
5. Who at your organization they’ll work with directly
6. References from organizations like yours

If they don’t lead with these, the pitch isn’t ready for your board.

How we work with our clients

We’re a small company that works specifically with Native American organizations, so this list isn’t just theory for us — these are the same questions we use when we propose work. If we can’t answer all eight of them for your board, then we’re not the right fit either.

For tribes thinking about any AI project (including with us), we offer a free 15-minute call to walk through these questions together. The point isn’t to sell you our service — it’s to help you ask the right questions when the next pitch comes in.

If you’d rather have a short written version to bring into a meeting, the AI 1-pager is a shorter version of the same thinking. Print it. Keep it in your desk drawer next to the next pitch.