Veynuus Embraces AI, With Clear Boundaries
From December 2024, Veynuus formally encourages all staff to integrate artificial intelligence into their daily work — not as a replacement for judgement, but as an extension of it.
The reasoning
Veynuus has always held that staying ahead means staying curious, and these tools are part of the period the firm is working in. There is also a more practical argument for taking a position rather than staying quiet. Staff use these systems whether or not an employer has a policy; the only thing an absent policy achieves is that nobody says so out loud, which makes it impossible to set a boundary or to share what works. Adopting a position was, in part, about ending that silence.
The tools earn their place on specific tasks. They are useful for first drafts that a person will then rewrite, for translation, for the routine code that cleans a dataset, for summarising a long document before reading it properly, for reformatting material between deliverables, and for testing an argument against a version of itself constructed differently. What they are not useful for is knowing what is true about Mogadishu. A system trained on the published record of a thinly documented region will still produce confident, fluent text about it, and confident fluency without a source is the most dangerous failure available in advisory work. Every substantive claim in a Veynuus deliverable has a person's name behind it, and that has not changed.
Where the line is
Client data, confidential work and any information held in trust will never be processed through AI tools. That covers survey responses from identifiable individuals, unpublished client material, ministry documents shared in confidence, and any personal data collected in the field. The rule is absolute rather than assessed case by case, because a rule with exceptions requires a judgement to be made at precisely the moment when convenience is at its most persuasive.
The reason for holding it that firmly is consent. A household that answered an enumerator's questions consented to a stated purpose and a named recipient. Passing that material through a third-party system falls outside what was agreed, whatever the terms of service happen to permit. The same reasoning applies to an official who shares a draft on the understanding that it stays in the room. The firm's obligation there is not a data-security obligation in the technical sense. It is an obligation to the person who trusted it.
What comes next
Veynuus is developing a comprehensive position on AI and emerging technologies that will be shared publicly. It will address disclosure to clients, how AI-assisted work is reviewed before it leaves the firm, how such tools are procured and assessed, and the questions the technology raises for the firm's human capital practice — including what it does to the entry-level roles through which people in this region have traditionally learned an analytical trade.
Until that document exists, this is the firm's operative rule: encouraged use, honest about where the tools help, and an unqualified boundary around anything held in trust.