How could an AI chatbot help staff or volunteers practise a difficult conversation, work through a realistic scenario, or get useful feedback as they learn?
A new free resource from Community Heart explores that question. AI Has Entered the Chat: A Playbook for Delivering Learning via AI Chatbots is a practical guide for Aotearoa New Zealand’s non-profit sector, designed to help organisations decide whether and how conversational AI could support their learning.
Written by Mike Curry, co-founder of Community Heart, the Playbook draws on research projects with three non-profit organisations as part of his Master of Professional Practice inquiry at Otago Polytechnic. It brings together practical guidance, case studies and lessons from designing, testing and refining AI learning experiences.
Good Learning Begins with People
The starting point is a learning need: something your people would benefit from understanding, discussing or practising.
A chatbot can give learners opportunities to respond to a situation, explain their thinking and receive feedback. Making that conversation useful takes thoughtful design. Clear learning goals, realistic scenarios and specific feedback all matter. So does making sure the experience reflects your organisation’s context and values.
The Playbook explores these choices, including the importance of our bicultural context, the accuracy of AI responses, and the time and resources needed to maintain an experience.
A Practical Pathway from Idea to Experience
The guide follows six stages: Explore, Design, Build, Test, Evaluate and Refine. You can use them to work through a new idea or revisit an experience you have already started.
Along the way, you’ll find guidance on shaping learning conversations, writing instructions for a chatbot, testing with learners and evaluating what happens. Three case studies show how different organisational priorities influenced the approach, from limited time and resources to a strong focus on accuracy.
No prior AI experience is assumed. The guide offers a starting point for people responsible for staff and volunteer learning, as well as teams curious about what conversational AI could offer their organisation.
Explore the Playbook
The Playbook is freely available as a PDF. Share it with your team, choose one learning challenge, and use the guide to explore whether a conversational approach could help.
Visit the AI Playbook page and download your free copy here: https://www.communityheart.co.nz/ai-playbook
