AI for the Business of
Arts and Culture
Don’t just implement AI. Design how your organization adapts to change.
From regional theaters to globally-recognized museums and concert halls, I help arts leaders find their new pace in a fast-changing world.
Who I Work With
Small and Mid-Sized Cultural Organizations (< $20M budgets)
You’re creative, pragmatic, and running lean. You don’t need more software… you need focus and guidance and strategic AI that delivers impact. You need direction and signal amid AI noise.
What we do together:
Assess AI readiness org-wide — people, process, and tools.
Map realistic AI opportunities.
Create lightweight AI governance and rollout plans that boards and foundations can back and your staff can rally behind.
Large Institutions ( $20M +)
You’re balancing innovation with reputation. Lots of departments. Need for coherence and strategic AI that embraces large-org data and complexity. You need someone who understands your world and lives at the tech forefront to save you translation time and cycles.
What we do together:
Align leadership around a shared AI modernization agenda.
Build policies and structures that make AI work and foster repeatable innovation and exploration org-wide.
Translate AI potential into compliance-safe, fundable action that brings real value.
Foundations, Alliances and Consortia
You’re steering the sector — balancing vision, accountability, and impact. I help you see across portfolios, benchmark readiness, and fund modernization that’s measurable and ethical. Modernization as sector strategy.
Mapping your AI future.
Step 1: Preparation
Implementing AI without understanding your staff’s mindset, a researched lines-of-sight roadmap and a clear governance policy is not wise. Don’t be that organization.
Get ready for AI
Staff Readiness Assessment
Evaluate your team’s AI fluency and readiness. Measure your team’s skills, confidence and current usage of AI. Identify training opportunities, cultural gaps or process shifts needed. This prep step is crucial.
Get ready for AI
AI Feasibility Mapping
Prioritize what’s worth AI'-ing. I overlay your current business practices with modern AI capabilities, saving you time researching hype from feasibility. My focus is whole-org, whole-customer. We narrow or widen the scope as you wish.
Get ready for AI
Governance and Policy Design
Create policy and guardrails that keep your organization’s data and reputation safe and fundable. Working with your leadership group, we define a responsible, mission-aligned set of AI policies and guardrails, leaving your Board and staff with clear understanding of how AI can be used cross-company.
Step 2: Implement and build
Pilot, prove and scale AI in your organization.
Use AI
AI pilot building
Translate strategy into small, low-risk proofs in the form of working code which answers the four key risks (value, business viability, tech feasibility and usability). A key step that builds internal confidence before investing in production-ready buildout.
Use AI
Evaluation and effectiveness review
Measure accuracy, bias, workflow fit and outcomes of AI in your org. No AI implementation should run without proper testing and monitoring.
Use AI
Scaled implementation
Move to production with change management, training, procurement and governance in place.
Step 3: Transform and build momentum
AI reflects and drives wider cultural change within. That needs different organizational muscle I help you build.
Harness the momentum
Future-track audit
Keep evolving on purpose. Annual or semi-annual reassessment to track how your team’s skills, technology evolution and governance are adapting as AI continues to evolve.
Harness the momentum
Leadership and innovation sprint
You’re not just implementing AI, you’re changing how your organization adapts to change. Technology and wider cultural change are entwined. Bringing decades of design thinking, product model thinking and nonprofit business model design together, this is CEO/C-suite level advising you can’t get anywhere else.
Harness the momentum
Innovation studio in-residence
Tech evolution is org evolution today. I provide ongoing advising and collaboration to integrate experimentation, design and product-thinking into everyday operations and evolution across your org.
The next decade isn’t about new tools (that’s the frenetic side show).
It’s about building organizations that can adapt at the speed of technology while getting stronger and better at their mission.
I’m Kristin Darrow.
Technology, Business Transformation and Arts and Culture.
For 20 years, I built tech that powers arts and culture — first at the Baltimore Symphony, then as a founding exec and Product leader/Chief Product Officer at Tessitura, the leading CRM/ ticketing / fundraising platform for nonprofit arts and culture.
In 2021, I stepped out to join Silicon Valley luminary Marty Cagan’s coaching group to help private sector tech companies move like the best innovator companies in the world as they manage change, lead innovation, and reinvent themselves in the AI era.
I’ve spent the last few years deeply immersed in AI and the Product Operating Model at-scale.
In short, I’m an innovation and org-transformation coach who knows a lot about AI and cultural organizations.
Now I’m connecting all these dots to help Arts and Culture orgs modernize in the AI era.
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