Bill Simmons
Nonprofit CEO for 16 years · builds with coding agents · author of The Way of Interruption
I help leaders of mission-driven organizations build AI tools they own, without stripping out the formation of the people doing the work.
Opening February 13, 2027
An AI services agency for mission-driven organizations.
The tools AI makes possible are powerful. Making them durable, hardened, persistent and secure is still the hard part, and it is the work I want to help organizations accomplish.
If you would like to talk about your organization once the agency opens, leave your email and I will let you know when it does.
The problem
Where organizations get stuck
Adoption is the wrong metric.
One person building with AI never shows up as adoption. What has actually changed about the work in a year is the measure that matters.
The tools are easy now. Owning them is the work.
Coding agents made building a tool easy. Keeping it running, keeping secrets out of the open, and making it last still take architecture.
The barrier is leadership, not technology.
Knowing what is worth building, what to trust and what to verify, and bringing real people through a change that frightens them.
What it does
Tools your own team owns, built to last, with the people kept in the work
Build
Working software for the work you already do, built in plain English with coding agents, on accounts you own, handed to a named person on your team.
Harden
Durable, persistent and secure: the part that is still hard, done to a standard your own security people can turn on.
Form
Improve what information does for you without stripping out the formation of the people doing the work. The machine holds information. Only a person can be formed.
Who it is for. Mission-driven organizations: relief and development, ministries, and nonprofits with lean teams, led by people who would rather own their tools than rent them.
The record
Built inside a working organization, not in a lab
- 26 yearsa chief executive, retail and nonprofit
- 50+applications built with coding agents, over 30 in production
- Millionsof dollars of software, hundreds of thousands of lines of code
- Under 25people on the whole organization that runs it
Writing
Most of these were published on LinkedIn first. The finals live here, on my own domain, where they are easy to find, link, and keep.
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Building
The public artifacts. Everything here runs in production somewhere.
- AI Briefing Agent (open template). An agent that watches your YouTube channels, reads your newsletters, and emails you one short brief. Free on GitHub: clone it and point it at your sources. Background: the post.
- The AI Boardroom (open template). A multi-agent Claude Code system designed to disagree: four to eight voices, two rounds, a synthesis of where they converge and split. Free on GitHub: hand the file to Claude Code and it builds you a /boardroom command. Background: the post.
- Inside Hope Rises. Donor intelligence, Salesforce-to-Google pipelines, financial reporting, foundation screening, a nightly backup Salesforce does not give you, and an inbox agent that triages my email. I open these builds up one post at a time in the writing.
Speaking
Live builds, not slide decks. The room supplies a problem and leaves with a working tool and the method that made it.
Upcoming
- Nonprofit Fundraisers Symposium. March 3 to 5, 2027, Washington, DC. "Everyone Has the Same AI. The Difference Is the Data." A session for senior fundraisers: what AI actually does with data, what bringing it into a nonprofit looked like from the chief executive's seat, and a live look inside one organization's filing cabinet.
- AI intensive workshops. Announcements coming soon. Three days, leaders building working software for their own organizations, no coding skills required.
Past
- Accord Network AI Summit. August 25 to 27, 2026, Ignatius House, Atlanta. Three days of building real software for your own organization, no coding skills required: sixty leaders from more than forty organizations. What the room said afterward, in its own survey:
- 22projects built, from 19 organizations
- 20 of 22rated their build likely to reach production
- 8 of 17had never finished a build before, and every one of them finished this one
- 12 of 17built a problem they had named weeks in advance
- Not Just Another AI Talk: Build Custom Agents That Actually Save You Time. 2026 Bridge Conference pre-conference workshop, July 29, 2026, National Harbor, Maryland. A three-hour live build for nonprofit teams, co-presented with Todd Bemis.
To invite me to speak, write to me.
About
I have been a chief executive for 26 years: two decades running a retail chain, and since 2010 President and CEO of Hope Rises International, a humanitarian organization founded in 1906 and working today to end neglected tropical diseases. I chair the board of the Accord Network and lead its AI programming.
I use coding agents to build the systems my organization runs on, directing the work in plain English. With no developers on staff, that has meant more than 50 applications, over 30 of them in production: millions of dollars of software, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, owned and run by a team of fewer than 25 people. Some of it I have built for other organizations.
Three days at a monastery in the New Mexico desert, during a three-month sabbatical, walking to the chapel with the monks seven times a day, taught me that formation as human beings is not information received. Only a person can be formed. Ilia Delio is exact about the machine: it holds information and has no interior, so it cannot form anyone. Information and formation are not opponents, so the question for a leader is not whether to use the tools; it is how to improve what information does for us without stripping out the formation of the people doing it. Greenville, South Carolina.
Connect
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn, or email.
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