AI in Vianney (Parish Intelligence)

Vianney's Parish Intelligence is a set of quiet helpers that save time without taking over. It drafts, sorts, summarizes, and answers questions — and a person always reviews before anything happens.

Where it helps

• Shepherd Notes — classifies a note, identifies who it is about (including resolving relational references like "his wife" to the actual parishioner on file), and drafts a kind reply.
• The sidebar assistant — answers a plain-English question ("how many open serving spots this weekend?", "how's giving this month?") from your parish's own live data. It reads the question first and only pulls in the areas the question is about — see What the AI can and cannot see for exactly how that works.
• Communications & greetings — drafts a message you then edit and send.
• Stewardship thank-you drafts — a warm, specific thank-you for a recorded gift, never a fundraising pitch.
• Readings at a glance — summarizes the day's readings.
• Forms — tidies a long list of fields into sensible sections.
• Portraits — generates an illustrated placeholder when there is no photo.
• Safe Environment — when the SE AI helper is enabled (Settings → Safe Environment), a coordinator can request a suggested clearance profile for a volunteer. Vianney reviews the role, ministry, and active requirement types, then drafts a suggested profile for the coordinator to review and accept. It sees no names, contact details, or sacramental data.
• Cemetery register import — when bringing in old cemetery records (see Bringing in old records, and the public grave finder), a photographed register page can be turned into proposed rows for the office to review, instead of typing each one in by hand.
• Sacrament register import — a separate, similar helper reads photographed pages from an old baptism, marriage, or burial register to propose entries for Sacrament Import; see Register OCR costs and the AI switch.
• Engagement suggestions — on request, drafts the wording for a Today suggested-action card (a newcomer welcome, funeral aftercare, an anniversary remembrance); the stage-derivation itself, and the pastoral content behind a suggestion, are never sent to the draft.
• Engagement profiles and people search — keeps a short profile of each adult parishioner, built from what the office already recorded, and answers a plain-English question about people ("who might help lead a men's retreat?") in Engagement → Intelligence or in the sidebar assistant. Profiles refresh a capped number at a time overnight, or one at a time from Refresh on a person's page. Children are never profiled, private Insights never enter it, and no dollar figure is ever quoted back to you — see What the AI can and cannot see.

The sidebar assistant answers from live data, by topic

Ask it about people and households, faith formation enrollment, giving, ministries and open serving slots, Safe Environment clearance counts, the cemetery, baptisms, marriage prep, funerals and the next dates the parish can bury on, sacraments celebrated this year, Mass intentions and the schedule, birthdays and anniversaries, or the sick list. Many questions are answered instantly by Vianney's own built-in rules, with nothing sent anywhere; a question none of the rules recognize goes to Claude, carrying only the live numbers the question is actually about, plus the same at-a-glance counts your Today dashboard already shows. Full detail: What the AI can and cannot see.

How it behaves

• It drafts and suggests only; it never sends, books, or decides on its own.
• It never guesses identity — it offers candidates and you choose.
• It is a paid add-on, so usage is metered; your parish chooses its plan.
• Every AI call is recorded for cost and latency — the model that was billed, which AI helper the call belonged to, the token counts, and the estimated cost. That is the whole list, and it is metadata only: the words of a prompt, the words of a reply, and any pastoral content are never stored, never traced, and never visible to anyone reviewing usage.

Turning features on and off

Under Settings → AI add-on, a master switch pauses every AI helper at once (no API spend while it is off). Below it, each helper — personal drafts, Shepherd Notes triage, Shepherd Notes reply drafts, readings summary, bulletin announcements, communication drafts, engagement suggestion drafts, stewardship thank-you drafts, policy digestion, the sidebar assistant, form field tidy-up, the cemetery register-import helper, sacrament register OCR import, faith formation email drafts, the formation program brief, engagement profiles and people search, and the Safe Environment helper — has its own toggle, so a parish can use some AI helpers and not others. A switched-off feature simply hides its button; the server also refuses the request if it is somehow called anyway.

Faith formation's two helpers (email drafts and the pastor's program brief) are the one exception to "on by default" — because they touch children's programs, both start off until your parish deliberately turns them on.

Tips

• If the add-on is off (as in the public demo), these helpers simply stand down and the rest of Vianney works normally.
• The same is true per-feature: switch one off and just that button disappears — everything else keeps working.
• See exactly what the AI does and does not see in What the AI can and cannot see.
• Some helpers work with pastoral information and need your parish's own explicit opt-in before that content reaches an AI provider — see Pastoral data and AI.