BoardPro's AI Assistant gives us time back across five boards, so we can focus more on our $1M community mission

Baygold: faster read-throughs and better recall, in service of a mission that gives back

Carina Hall came to board software the way a lot of secretaries do – from doing everything by hand. Across earlier volunteer organisations, committees and school boards, her governance work ran on manual process and SharePoint. When she inherited BoardPro at Baygold, it was her first board portal, and it stuck quickly. "It was like – wow, this is magic," she says. Within a week or two she was running with it.

Today she oversees governance across the whole Baygold group: five boards and multiple committees, and she's in BoardPro most days. She's also a confident AI user in her own work, which means she came to AI Assistant with a working benchmark rather than a blank slate.

The group those boards serve has an unusually explicit reason to run well. Baygold's mission is to return $1 million to the community each year by 2030 – sustainable giving, funded by the group's operations. "They want to see the good stuff go back into the community," Carina says. The boards exist so the group can do that, and the governance behind five entities is what makes it possible.

Reading for the gist, not the detail

What surprised Carina about AI Assistant was what it turned out to be for. "I don't think I was expecting it to be able to summarise a board pack," she says. "I thought it was maybe a bit more for search."

That summarising is where the time comes back for her. As the secretary across a group, she needs the shape of a discussion without reading every paper end to end. "I need to have an idea of what the conversation is, but I don't necessarily need to know the full detail," she says. "Being able to summarise that with the Assistant gives me so much of my time back."

The judgement about what she needs to read in full stays with her – the Assistant just gets her to the gist faster. She still sits across the decisions and actions that matter; the summary is a way in, not a substitute for knowing her boards.

"Where did we land on that?"

The second use is one Carina is actively encouraging with Baygold's chairs and directors: looking back at what a board actually decided. A busy chair preparing an agenda doesn't always remember where a matter landed a few meetings ago.

"It's really good for looking at what decisions were made," she says. "If they're preparing an agenda – where were we at with that? Do I need to follow up? Where did we land? What do I need to know ahead of the next meeting?" She's had that conversation with several of her chairs, and the response has been positive.

Why the software underneath matters

Carina's confidence in the AI rests on the platform underneath it. She remembers the manual, SharePoint-based way of working that came before, and what a portal changed. For a group her size, the value isn't any single feature – it's being able to move between five boards and two committees without losing her place. "Sometimes you're jumping in and out of things so often that the simplicity is actually quite key," she says.

That foundation is also why she recommends it beyond Baygold. She recently brought BoardPro into a not-for-profit surf club board she sits on. "I'm a big fan of BoardPro," she says.

The time goes where the mission is

For an organisation that measures itself by what it gives away, time spent well is not a soft benefit. Every pack Carina reads for the gist instead of in full, and every agenda a chair prepares faster because the last decision was easy to find, is capacity pointed back at the boards' actual work – and, through that work, at the community Baygold exists to support.

AI Assistant handles the retrieval and the summarising; Carina and her chairs arrive knowing where things stand; the governance runs leaner. Baygold's boards meet so the group can return a million dollars a year to its community. Capacity, in that context, isn't an abstraction – it's the thing the whole endeavour is built to generate.