One assistant is a chatbot. A team of them is a staff.

Here is how AI has helped me in the last five months.

• I do not take meeting notes anymore. My calls, our cohort sessions, our board meetings, even a Sunday service, get recorded and summarized on their own, with the action items pulled out and waiting for me. I used to lose the first twenty minutes after every meeting just trying to remember what we decided and going through my notes. If I forget I go back to the transcription or ask AI to help pull out the key talking points and action steps.
• Sermon and study prep got faster. The research assistant I built pulls the cross references, the historical context, and observations on the passage. It allows me to study the passage, reflect, pray, and meditate over it, and then come back to see what it pulled together. Note: I still need to do the work to study, but I then use it to help me process my thoughts and help me see different viewpoints.
• I build my own tools and websites now, and I do not know how to code. This is the one that still gets me. I describe what I want in plain English, and AI builds it. People call it vibe coding. I never knew what vibe coding was. I have built full websites, working apps, and internal tools this way, things I would have had to hire out for, or more honestly, would never have gotten to at all because they were deemed impossible.
• Design stopped being a wall. I have two AI design directors I lean on. I call them Walt and Warner. I can get a site or a page to actually look good and feel like us, without a design degree or a big budget. Claude Code is not great at designing websites, it is okay, so I ask ChatGPT Plus for insights on how to make it better and to help me write a prompt for Claude Code to build.

Now here is the part that still surprises me, and it is the part most people have yet to understand.

I have a team of AI agents that work for me.

I have one that only reviews my code and catches mistakes. One that only looks at and hunts down bugs. One that fact checks. One that writes. Two that act as design directors and argue about how something should look and feel. I even have a panel of theology voices I can pull up when I am working through a passage with a certain theological framework they operate out of. Each one is focused on a single job and gets good at it, the same way you would build a staff. In the AI world these are called subagents, and once you have them, you stop thinking of AI as a chatbot and start thinking of it as a team.

These subagents can crunch large amounts of information or lay out budgets cleanly on an Excel spreadsheet. I even have it in the background cleaning up our CRM.

And they work in the background. I can hand off three different tasks, jump on a Zoom call, work on a project proposal or a grant application, and come back to three finished drafts. It is like having people working in parallel while you focus on the one thing only you can do.

I also have an AI agent that writes in my voice. It has learned how I talk, so what comes back does not sound like a stiff corporate robot. It sounds like me. I do have to feed it my writing so it can understand me, and I still need to read it over and edit, but it is so much easier than writing from scratch. I even tie it into my email so it can pull information into donor reports and updates.

None of this is about doing ministry faster so you can cram more in. It is about clearing away the busywork and mundaneness of the job so your team can be more efficient in what they do. The AI notes still get names and numbers wrong sometimes, so skim before you forward anything. What you vibe code still needs a careful eye before real people use it. And do not let the tool attend the meeting for you. It assists you, but it should never replace you. You still need a team of real people working alongside you.

And it is not just me.

Some of the most creative uses I have seen are churches doing things that used to be impossible. One church runs their sermon through AI as it is preached, so a visitor can hear it in their own language on their phone, in real time, with no interpreter in the room. Another takes a single Sunday message and lets AI turn it into a whole week of content, short clips for social, a daily devotional, small group discussion questions, and the midweek email, all from the one sermon they already preached. Same work they were already doing, ten times the reach.

Next time I want to show you the flip side of efficiency, which is innovation. Not just doing your old work faster, but doing things a small ministry never could before.

If you are trying to figure out where AI could give your team their time back and you would rather not sort it out alone, reach out. This is the work I do, and I love talking through it. My email is tommyplee@gmail.com.