Overreliance means trusting what an AI tool tells you more than it deserves. When that happens, its mistakes slip into your decisions, documents or code because nobody checks them. It is also called automation bias. Picture a staff member who asks a chatbot to summarize a grant’s eligibility rules, then pastes the summary into an application without reading the original. If the tool got one rule wrong, nobody notices until the application is turned down.
Why it matters
The risk grows when the answer sounds confident and your people are busy, which describes most small organizations most of the time. An AI tool can produce a hallucination in the same calm, polished tone as a correct answer, so the tone tells you nothing. The fix is mostly about habits. Have a person review anything that matters before it goes out, such as donor letters, financial figures or legal wording. Write down what AI is allowed to decide on its own in your acceptable use policy. When you talk to a vendor, ask how their tool shows where an answer came from (for example, through grounding) and what they recommend your staff check before relying on it.
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