AI person profiles, and asking about your people in plain English

Two related features, both part of the AI add-on: a short profile of each adult parishioner, and a search box you can ask a question in ordinary English.

Both are switched off until your parish turns on Engagement profiles in Settings → AI. A feature that is off never sees any data, because it never runs.

What a profile is

One stored summary per person, on their Engagement → AI Profile tab: a headline sentence and a handful of short points, drawn together from what the parish already knows — recorded details, service and volunteering, participation, form signups, correspondence, sacraments, giving patterns, and how they respond to messages.

It is a starting point for a conversation, never a verdict. Nothing about it acts on its own.

What a profile never sees

This is the part worth reading twice.

• Private Insights never enter any AI call. Not for the office, not for the pastor, not once. Only insights explicitly marked public are ever read.
• Shepherd Notes and care cases are never read here.
• Safe Environment records are never read here.
• Chat is never read here.
• Served history is excluded — the count of times someone showed up to serve is a record for a human, never an AI input. See Service, volunteering and participation.
• Nothing confession-adjacent is in the system at all, so it cannot be here.

Giving, and who sees amounts

Giving patterns — weekly, monthly, lapsed, responds to appeals — inform every profile, and everyone with Engagement access sees that paragraph.

Amounts are held separately and withheld by the server from anyone without the Stewardship amounts permission. There is one stored profile with two renderings, and the withholding is decided on the server, never by the screen you happen to be looking at. See A household's giving.

Adults only

A profile is written for a living adult of your parish and nobody else. Open a child's page and it says so, calmly, and stops — no empty card, no "Build now" button offering something Vianney will never build. Minors appear only as household context inside their parents' profiles, never as a subject.

Somebody whose birth date you do not have counts as an adult. Most real imports have no birth date for grown-ups, and excluding them would blank the feature for exactly the parishes that need it.

How profiles stay current

• Overnight, Vianney refreshes profiles for the people whose activity is newer than their last build, up to a nightly cap, so the cost stays small and predictable.
• On demand, the Refresh button on a person's AI Profile rebuilds that one person now. A profile that has gone stale since its last build says so.

Initialize profiles — a deliberate, confirmed run

Building profiles for a whole parish for the first time is a real expense, so it never happens by accident. In Settings → AI, the Initialize profiles control shows you, before you start:

• how many adults are eligible;
• how many are missing a profile;
• what a profile has actually cost your parish so far, from your own metered history rather than a guess;
• the estimated total for the run.

You must confirm explicitly, and the confirmation says plainly that the run spends AI credit. It then works through one person at a time, pacing itself, showing progress as it goes. You can Cancel at any point and it stops at the next person. Two runs can never overlap — that would double the bill for the same work.

Choose missing to fill the gaps, or all to rebuild everybody.

✦ AI Search — asking about your people

Engagement → Intelligence opens on a free dashboard: your parish at a glance, drawn from the profiles already built. It makes no AI calls at all, so a pastor can open it every morning without spending anything. Every tile is clickable and filters straight to those people — also free.

Below it is the question box. Type a question and press ✦ AI Search:

• *Who speaks Spanish and could help at the festival?*
• *Who might be interested in a women's retreat?*
• *Who has professional skills we could call on?*
• *Who was involved once but has gone quiet?*

There is a library of ready-made questions beside the box; tap one to run it.

Reading the results

Results come back as a table. The columns are chosen from your question — ask about volunteering and you get a Volunteering column with a count and the actual list; ask about widows and you get when the spouse died. Click any column heading to sort by it, so "who carries a heavy volunteer load" can be sorted by how many.

Every result carries a Why — the concrete thing that matched, drawn from a real record. Click a name to open the person.

At the foot: how many profiles are built, when the nightly refresh runs, and what this search just cost, in plain money. An exact question — marital status, languages, veterans — skips the ranking step entirely and costs a fraction of a cent, and it says so. The price is a fact you can see, not a surprise on a bill.

When nothing matches, nothing is what you get

This one is deliberate, and it replaced earlier behaviour that was quietly wrong.

If a question does not match anybody, the search returns nobody, plus a short note explaining what it can actually see. It does not loosen the search and hand you a plausible-looking list instead.

Vianney used to re-run a failed search with the user's own words, on the theory that a filter matching nobody was worse than a loose one. That is backwards. A loose filter answered *"who are the widows"* with Parish Council members, each with a confident reason attached — and wrong people get wrong pastoral outreach. Nobody is the right answer to a question the records cannot answer.

The same honesty applies when the AI is switched off or unavailable: the search falls back to matching the recorded facts alone and tells you it is doing that, rather than pretending.

Tips

• Fill in person details first. Languages, skills and accessibility needs are what most questions actually search.
• Treat every result as a list of people to think about, not a list to act on. Nothing here sends anything — see Communications.
• Every AI call is metered, and a parish can switch any AI feature off entirely in Settings → AI add-on.