What a Ruth AI Taught One Mautic Team About Business Continuity

Summary

Before taking a three-month ordination retreat, a Mautic Project Lead built Ruth AI to help the leadership team and Council handle operational questions during an absence when the author would be unreachable. Ruth AI was a shared custom Gem in Google Gemini, configured with instructions about the author’s reasoning and writing style, Mautic’s values and governance, and roughly ten uploaded files. Its context combined relevant AI chat history, a private Obsidian knowledge vault, a shared task spreadsheet, and Mautic’s public documentation. The team documented recurring daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly work, assigned named people to those tasks, and updated the knowledge base whenever a question exposed a documentation gap. In practice, team members used it to find billing instructions, fiscal-host contact details, guidance for prospective users, translation-review procedures, and help with website drafts. It was particularly useful to newer contributors who might hesitate to ask a person, and its draft feedback gave colleagues a starting point for discussion. The system also produced convincing errors: it invented nonexistent folders, fabricated details about how services were paid for, repeated answers that people had already tried, and sometimes reported missing-file errors. The author concluded that the AI was only as reliable as the documentation behind it, while the documentation exercise itself exposed obsolete or draining tasks and improved succession planning. The knowledge remains in a team-owned, plain-text vault rather than belonging to the AI provider or one individual. The author recommends starting early, disabling training on shared data, reviewing and redacting chat-history exports, separating sensitive contact details, keeping knowledge portable and ideally version controlled, warning users to verify money, access, and decision-related answers with humans, and assigning named people to responsibilities during the absence.