👋 Welcome back
Hello again — and welcome to anyone joining us for the first time this week. 🐾
This week we've got a proper mix: a data privacy story that should make every small organisation sit up straight, a study result that's actually quite uncomfortable, some good news for charities, and a freelance reality check that's worth reading even if it stings a little.
Let's go.
#charity
92% of Nonprofits Are Now Using AI — But Most Are Winging It
According to a survey of 346 nonprofits, 92% are now using AI in some capacity. That's remarkable adoption for a technology that barely existed in its current form two years ago. But here's the uncomfortable part — 81% are using it on an ad hoc basis with no documentation of what actually works, and 47% have no AI governance policy at all.
What does that mean in practice? Multiple people on the same team solving identical problems in isolation. No shared learning. No consistency. And real risk of something going wrong with donor data or grant applications.
The good news for smaller charities: smaller, more nimble organisations can actually pivot faster than large ones. You don't need a six-month AI strategy. You need one person to start writing down what works — and share it with the team.
This week's action: Create a simple shared doc called "AI Wins" and start logging what prompts and tools are actually saving your team time. That's your AI policy. Done.
#smallbusiness
Someone Is Selling Your Old Slack Messages to Train AI — And You Probably Didn't Know
This one's worth knowing about. A service called SimpleClosure — which helps failing startups wind down — has launched something called Asset Hub, letting businesses licence their internal Slack messages, emails and company data to AI developers for training purposes.
The kicker? Employees whose conversations are being sold almost certainly never consented to this. Those internal messages contain real people, real opinions, real private conversations — and they were never meant to become AI training data.
What this means for you: If you use Slack, Teams or any other workplace messaging tool, it's worth checking your organisation's data policies and understanding what happens to that data if you ever close or switch platforms. And if you use AI tools yourself, it's worth checking whether your inputs are being used to train their models. Most reputable tools (including Claude and ChatGPT's paid tiers) have clear opt-outs for this.
Privacy isn't paranoia — it's just good practice.
#VA
Ten Minutes Is All It Takes — And Not In a Good Way
A new study found that just ten minutes of using AI as an answer machine can measurably erode problem-solving skills. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. But measurably.
For VAs, this is worth sitting with. The risk isn't that AI replaces you — it's that you quietly stop building the judgment that makes you irreplaceable. If you're using AI to answer questions you'd previously have figured out yourself, you're borrowing from your own future.
The fix is simple: use AI to do the work faster, not to do the thinking for you. Ask it to draft, not to decide. Ask it to summarise, not to conclude. Keep the judgment yours.
That's the difference between a VA who uses AI and a VA who's worth every penny they charge.
#freelance
The Freelance Market Is Changing — Here's the Honest Picture
Downloads on Fiverr fell 18% year on year in 2024, and Upwork dropped 22% over the same period. The trend has continued into 2026 as clients turn directly to AI for tasks they previously outsourced.
That's the uncomfortable bit. Here's the useful bit: demand for freelancers with AI-related skills on Upwork is up 27%. Clients aren't abandoning freelancers — they're abandoning commodity work. Basic blog posts, simple graphics, generic social content — AI does those now, and cheaply.
What clients can't get from AI is strategic thinking, industry expertise, and someone who genuinely understands their business. The freelancers thriving right now have stopped selling tasks and started selling outcomes.
If you're a VA, a writer, a bookkeeper or a content creator — you're not competing with AI. You're competing with the version of yourself who hasn't figured out how to use it yet.
💡 The Mads Moment
One small thing you can do this week.
Do a five-minute AI audit.
Open your last ten tasks or client jobs. Which ones could AI have helped with — and didn't? Which ones did you use AI for — and was the output actually any good?
You don't need a tool for this. Just a honest look at where your time went and whether AI is actually in your workflow or just something you mean to use more.
Five minutes. That's all.
That's Issue 002 done! 🐾
Enjoying Mads Muse? Forward it to one person who'd find it useful. That's how we grow — no ads, no algorithms, just word of mouth.
See you next Friday.
Anna (& Mads, in spirit 🖤)
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