June 16, 2026
A vendor one of my clients works with recently forced two-factor authentication using an authenticator mobile app on their platform. Good security practice. Reasonable decision.
The rollout looked like this: their support staff met with over forty people to walk them through how to set up an authenticator app on their phones. One by one. In person, on the phone, over video.
Three people didn't have smartphones. They can no longer access the service.
Nobody budgeted for that. Nobody planned for it.
And when these people lose their phones, or upgrade to a new phone and forget to transfer their authenticator app and its records, they'll be contacting the nonprofit's support staff again, only this time, help won't come quickly. And, they will no longer be able to access the service.
When the next software update comes, the next security requirement, or the next platform migration, it will happen again. The same unplanned cost, the same untracked hours, the same quiet erosion of staff capacity and organizational trust.
This is not a story about a bad vendor decision. It's a story about what technology change actually costs at the operational level.
And it's a cost that almost nobody is counting.
The gap between what technology promises and what it costs
The technology industry has a term for their version of this problem: technical debt. The code that works but was never quite right. The shortcuts that compound over time. The integrations that hold everything together until they don't.
Operational debt is the human version. It's the organizational capacity consumed by the gap between what a technology promises and what it actually takes to run it. Unlike technical debt, it almost never shows up in a budget. It shows up in staff burnout, in workarounds nobody documented, in the slow erosion of trust between teams and the tools they are supposed to use.
It's invisible until it isn't.
The phones weren't working
A family member of mine was recently diagnosed with cancer. They spent two days calling a treatment center trying to get an appointment. No answer, no callback to the numerous messages they left. They finally drove over in person.
The phones had not been working.
I'm not telling that story to be dramatic. I'm telling it because it's the clearest illustration I have of what operational debt looks like when it reaches people who can least afford it. The technology failed quietly, and nobody noticed for two days. The person carrying the weight of that failure was a patient trying to start cancer treatment.
That's not a technology problem. That's an accountability problem. And it's happening, in less visible ways, in organizations everywhere.
Into this reality, we are selling 40-agent AI workflows
The same week, I was in a meeting where someone described a new AI implementation in terms of how many agents it used. The number was meant to signal sophistication. Innovation. The number of people that this implementation was going to assist was somehow tied to this 40 number.
My first thought was: does anyone know what any of those agents are doing?
My second thought was: we can't even get the phones to work.
I want to be clear. I am not anti-technology and I am not anti-AI. There are real use cases and there are organizations doing this well. But the organizations doing it well are not the ones moving fastest. They're the ones who did the unglamorous work first. Clean data. Clear ownership. Staff who actually understand the tools they use every day, documented processes to check that the technology works as intended, and more documented processes for how to fix things when it doesn't.
For most nonprofits, that work is not even close to done. And nobody is counting what it costs to skip it.
The question I think we should be asking
Before your organization takes on another layer of complexity, ask who is counting the real cost of what you already have. Not the license fee; the operational cost. The support hours. The workarounds. The staff member who quietly stopped using the system because a spreadsheet was easier. The three people who can no longer access a service because they don't own a smartphone.
That accounting doesn't get done because it's not glamorous. It doesn't generate a press release. It doesn't look like progress.
But it's the work that determines whether the next thing you build actually holds.
The organizations that scale technology successfully aren't the ones with the most agents. They are the ones who know what they already have, what it costs, and what their people can actually sustain.
Until we can answer those questions honestly, we're not ready for 40 agents.
We're barely ready for the phones.
Lisa Montague is Partner and CEO at Coat Rack, a nonprofit technology consulting firm based out of Cedar City, Utah.
