Date: Tuesday, February 17, 2026
In this post, I’ll explore strategies for managing your integration of AI into your needs assessment (or evaluation) projects. I’m Ryan Watkins, a Professor of Educational Technology, and Associate Director of Trustworthy AI, at the George Washington University in Washington DC.
With recent advancement in AI technologies, especially with LLMs, needs assessors (and evaluators) may believe they are facing a false binary: either ignore LLMs or hand over the reins to automated systems. Thinking in terms of a continuum, however, replaces that dilemma with a series of manageable human-AI collaboration “levels”. Each level pairs a concrete capability gain—say, faster data analysis or richer brainstorming—with a matching guardrail—documenting prompts, logging versioning, or securing data. As you climb, you purposefully expand the model’s agency as your collaborator, while keeping your own agency, expertise, ethics, and institutional obligations firmly in the loop.
Below is a quick-reference guide to each level of the adoption continuum, linking definitions to practical descriptions, oversight needs, and illustrative examples.
While the adoption continuum helps you ask, “What kind of relationship do I want with LLMs in this needs assessment (or evaluation) project?”, the checkpoints below help you answer, “How can I responsibly support that relationship in practice?” These checkpoints sketch what people, process, and policy considerations become relevant at each level.
A key lesson learned is that responsible AI integration is less about reaching the highest level and more about aligning the chosen level with your team’s goals, skills, and institutional expectations. Starting with lower levels often helps teams understand capabilities and limitations before scaling up.
Not every assessment team will want to move toward Level 5; the goal is to clarify what responsible use looks like at each level—not to prescribe a uniform destination. But whichever level you choose, responsible integration requires alignment between goals, team capability, technical setup, and institutional expectations.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Needs Assessment (NA) TIG Week with our colleagues in the NA AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our NA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.