A camp director opens her laptop before breakfast and faces three unfinished tasks. She needs a first draft of tomorrow’s rain plan, a clearer packing reminder for parents, and a response to a counselor worried about a withdrawn camper. Artificial intelligence (AI) could help with all three. It should help with only two. The central question for camp leaders is no longer whether to use AI. The more useful questions now are, “Where does AI belong, under what conditions, and where must a person remain fully responsible?”
That boundary matters because camp exists to create experiences that technology cannot reproduce. American Camp Association (ACA) research identifies supportive relationships, safety, youth involvement, and skill building as central features of positive youth development (ACA, 2015). AI can reduce the paperwork surrounding those experiences. It cannot notice the tremor in a camper’s voice, understand the history behind a conflict, or earn a family’s trust through years of consistent care.
So, once a camp has carefully evaluated how their community and staff will respond to using AI and determined they will proceed, camp leaders need a practical rule: use AI to prepare work, organize work, and improve routine work. Keep people in charge of decisions that affect safety, health, dignity, employment, discipline, belonging, and relationships. That means clear responsibility should be assigned to an individual or group for risk management, staff training, emergency planning, health, supervision, and camper protection. AI may support these responsibilities. It should never obscure who owns them.
Start with a Stoplight Instead of a Technology Strategy
Camps don’t need a sweeping transformation plan before they experiment. They should consider using a simple stoplight system:
- Green uses involve low-risk drafting and organization.
- Yellow uses require informed human review because the output reaches families, staff, campers, or outside partners.
- Red uses invoalve consequential decisions or sensitive information and should remain human-led.
This model translates the principles behind responsible AI use (Autio et al., 2024) into choices a camp team can make during a busy season.
The green light zone includes tasks where an error would cause limited harm and a staff member can easily correct it. AI can draft a supply checklist, shorten an approved staff memo, suggest event names, revise a fundraising paragraph, or organize brainstorming notes. The US Department of Education (2026) lists training support, project management, content organization, and process improvement among useful forms of routine administrative work that AI can assist.
Program planning also fits the green zone when staff treat the output as raw material. A director might request variations on a nature scavenger hunt or indoor options for a stormy afternoon. Staff still check developmental fit, staffing, equipment, site conditions, cultural context, and accessibility. AI broadens the starting menu. Experienced people choose the actual program.
AI can also help revise materials for different formats. A staff trainer could turn an approved policy into a quiz, a role-play scenario, a one-page reminder, and a set of discussion prompts. That can strengthen camp staff training, especially when camps already plan how policies will be communicated, practiced, and reinforced. The final training still needs a knowledgeable person who can correct errors, explain judgment calls, and rehearse the real procedure with staff.
Accessibility offers another promising green or yellow use. AI can help produce simpler language, visual schedules, translations, large-print drafts, or alternate explanations. The CAST Universal Design for Learning framework emphasizes multiple ways to communicate and engage learners (CAST, 2026). People with relevant expertise or lived experience should review the result, because unreviewed adaptations can introduce stereotypes, confusion, or false assumptions.
Put Public-facing Work in the Yellow Zone
The yellow zone begins when AI-generated language leaves the office. Camps can use AI to draft enrollment reminders, arrival instructions, donor updates, sponsorship language, website copy, and answers to common questions. A staff member who knows the camp must verify every detail, remove generic phrasing, and make sure the message sounds like a real person. Strong parent communication starts before camp and helps families understand expectations, requirements, and how the camp will care for their children.
This review should involve more than proofreading. AI can produce polished language that contains the wrong deadline, an invented policy, an inaccurate medical instruction, or a promise the camp can’t keep. The reviewer should compare the draft with the authoritative calendar, handbook, registration system, health guidance, and approved policy. For crisis messages, a director or designated communications lead should write or approve the final text. Speed matters during a crisis — but accuracy, empathy, and accountability matter more.
Staff should also protect youth privacy when they prompt an AI tool. UNICEF’s updated guidance calls for child-centered systems that protect data, ensure safety, support fairness, and preserve human accountability (2025). A camp employee should avoid entering a camper’s name, date of birth, diagnosis, medication, behavior history, family conflict, disability details, contact information, or identifiable photograph into a general-purpose AI system unless the camp has deliberately approved that system and its data practices for that exact use.
The risk extends beyond obvious medical records. The OWASP Gen AI Security Project (2025a) warns that sensitive information disclosure can involve personally identifiable information, health records, confidential business data, and other protected material. A useful camp rule is simple: remove names and distinguishing details before asking AI to help with a pattern, template, or general scenario. When the real identity matters, keep the task inside approved systems and established human processes.
Camps that provide children with direct access to digital tools carry additional responsibilities. The Federal Trade Commission (2026) explains that covered online services directed to children under 13 may face parental consent requirements before collecting personal information. Camps should obtain advice on applicable laws and prohibit improvised camper accounts on whatever tool a counselor happens to use.
Draw Firm Red Lines Around Care and Consequence
Some camp responsibilities belong in the red zone. AI should never make the final call about whether a camper can participate or a symptom requires medical attention. Neither should it determine whether a child poses a risk, suspected abuse must be reported, discipline is appropriate, or whether a family receives urgent notification. These decisions require human judgment, contextual knowledge, accountable authority, and often licensed or specially trained professionals (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2025).
Mental health and emotional support require especially clear boundaries. The American Psychological Association (2025) advises against using chatbots as a substitute for qualified mental healthcare, because their responses can remain limited and unpredictable in crisis situations. Camp staff should route mental health decisions through trained people and established protocols. A chatbot should never become the camp’s counselor, crisis screener, or private companion for a distressed child.
Pediatric guidance reaches a similar conclusion. The American Academy of Pediatrics explains that chatbots may provide false, harmful, violent, sexual, or misleading responses and cannot replace the stable relationships children need (Parga-Belinkie, 2025). Camps should treat direct camper conversations with general-purpose AI chatbots as a supervised educational activity, when they allow them at all, rather than an invisible background service available throughout the day.
Recent product testing strengthens the case for caution. Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute found inaccurate or unsafe answers in child and teen testing and rated Google’s AI search features an unacceptable risk to children (2026). A familiar brand or built-in safety setting does not guarantee an age-appropriate response.
Emergency response also belongs firmly with people. AI can help staff create a tabletop exercise before the season or turn an approved emergency plan into practice questions. During an actual missing-person event, severe-weather threat, injury, transportation problem, or security incident, staff must follow the camp’s established chain of command and emergency communications procedures. No one should pause to ask a chatbot what to do when the camp already has a trained response system.
Incident records need similar discipline. AI can help create a blank template or train staff on the difference between observation and interpretation. Staff should record real events accurately, promptly, and through the camp’s approved system. ACA guidance on incident documentation emphasizes clarity about where information belongs, who records it, and how computer-based records track individual entries (Erceg, 2014). An AI rewrite can unintentionally alter sequence, certainty, tone, or responsibility.
Hiring decisions also carry too many consequences for casual AI use. A camp may improve a job description or draft interview questions with AI, but it should avoid opaque applicant rankings or personality inferences. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warns that AI hiring tools can mask or perpetuate bias and remain subject to civil rights laws (2021).
Use Five Questions Before Every New AI Task
A workable AI risk management process doesn’t require a technical committee. You can ask just five questions:
- What information enters the tool?
- Who could be affected by an error?
- Can a person verify the answer?
- Can the harm be reversed?
- Does the task depend on trust, expertise, or knowledge of a specific child?
Sensitivity, consequence, uncertainty, irreversibility, and relationship risk move a task toward red.
The first question often settles the issue. If the prompt contains identifiable camper, family, donor, employee, health, financial, or legal information, stop and check the tool’s approval status and terms. Online-service guidance from the Department of Education (n.d.) recommends evaluating vendor terms and privacy practices, including how a service collects, uses, transmits, and stores information. Camps can borrow that vendor-review habit even when education privacy laws don’t directly govern their programs.
The second technical risk involves outside content. AI systems that summarize websites, uploaded documents, emails, or connected databases may encounter hidden instructions designed to manipulate the model. OWASP describes this problem as prompt injection, which can steer output, expose data, or trigger unauthorized actions (2025b). Camps should limit tool access, avoid connecting experimental systems to sensitive records, and require human approval before an AI system sends messages, changes schedules, purchases supplies, or updates official files.
Build a Policy Staff Can Actually Use
A useful camp AI policy can fit on two pages. Make sure to name:
- Approved tools
- Prohibited information
- Green, yellow, and red uses
- Required reviewers
- The person responsible for questions or incidents
Tell seasonal staff how to report an unapproved use or data mistake. A clear reporting path gives leaders a chance to reduce harm instead of driving mistakes underground.
Training should use camp-specific examples. Ask staff to classify situations such as drafting a talent show announcement, translating a packing list, summarizing a named camper’s health form, evaluating a counselor, or helping a homesick child. Practice turning risky prompts into safer general templates. UNESCO, a specialized agency of the United Nations that works to build world peace through international cooperation in education, the sciences, and culture, offers guidance for age-appropriate AI use with data protection and human-centered oversight (2026).
Camps should explain their approach to families before introducing camper-facing tools. Federal education guidance emphasizes engaging parents and affected stakeholders in technology decisions (US Department of Education, 2025). Describe the:
- Purpose
- Age group
- Supervision
- Information collected
- Vendor
- Opt-out process
- Human contact for questions
Clear facts give families a basis for trust and feedback.
Finally, try piloting one green use before expanding. Measure whether it saves staff time, reduces errors, improves clarity, or simply produces more material to review. NIST’s playbook recommends that organizations measure actual performance against manual processes and collect feedback from users (n.d.). Camps should also monitor and retire systems that drift, create repeated mistakes, exceed the organization’s tolerance for risk, or distract staff from the work that matters.
The best camp technology strategy begins with restraint. Use AI for the blank page, first draft, checklist, format change, and brainstorming session. Keep people responsible for care, truth, safety, fairness, and connection. That division supports thoughtful AI adoption at work without turning camp into a technology experiment. Clear boundaries can give staff more time for the conversations, observations, encouragement, and shared experiences that make camp worth attending.
References
American Camp Association. (2015, August 5). Inspirations: Developmental supports and opportunities of youths’ experiences at camp. ACAcamps.org/resources/inspirations-developmental-supports-opportunities-youths-experiences-camp
American Psychological Association. (2025, November 13). Artificial intelligence, wellness apps alone cannot solve mental health crisis. apa.org/news/press/releases/2025/11/ai-wellness-apps-mental-health
Autio, C., Schwartz, R., Dunietz, J., Jain, S., Stanley, M., Tabassi, E., Hall, P., & Roberts, K. (2024). Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile (NIST AI 600-1). National Institute of Standards and Technology. doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.600-1
CAST. (2026). About the Guidelines 3.0 update. udlguidelines.cast.org/more/about-guidelines-3-0/
Common Sense Media. (2026, July 15). Google’s AI search poses unacceptable risk to kids, Common Sense Media finds. commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/googles-ai-search-poses-unacceptable-risk-to-kids-common-sense-media-finds
Erceg, L. E. (2014, March 1). Risk management: Write right! Documenting camp incidents. Camping Magazine. ACAcamps.org/article/camping-magazine/risk-management-write-right-documenting-camp-incidents
Federal Trade Commission. (2026, May). Children’s online privacy protection rule: Not just for kids’ sites. ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-not-just-kids-sites
National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2025, March 18). AI Risk Management Framework FAQs. NIST. nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework/ai-risk-management-framework-faqs
National Institute of Standards and Technology. (n.d.) Measure. NIST. airc.nist.gov/airmf-resources/playbook/measure/
OWASP Gen AI Security Project. (2025a). LLM02: 2025 sensitive information disclosure. genai.owasp.org/llmrisk/llm022025-sensitive-information-disclosure/
OWASP Gen AI Security Project. (2025b). LLM01: Prompt injection. genai.owasp.org/llmrisk2023-24/llm01-24-prompt-injection/
Parga-Belinkie, J. (2025, August 27). How AI chatbots affect kids: Benefits, risks & what parents need to know. American Academy of Pediatrics. healthychildren.org/English/family-life/Media/Pages/are-ai-chatbots-safe-for-kids.aspx
UNESCO. (2026, January 16). Guidance for generative AI in education and research. unesco.org/en/articles/guidance-generative-ai-education-and-research?hub=66580
UNICEF. (2025, December). Guidance on AI and children. unicef.org/innocenti/reports/policy-guidance-ai-children
US Department of Education. (2025, July 22). US Department of
Education issues guidance on artificial intelligence use in schools, proposes additional supplemental priority. ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-guidance-artificial-intelligence-use-schools-proposes-additional-supplemental-priority
US Department of Education. (2016, February 10). Artificial intelligence (AI) guidance. ed.gov/about/ed-overview/artificial-intelligence-ai-guidance
US Department of Education. (n.d.). Privacy and education technology. studentprivacy.ed.gov/privacy-and-education-technology
US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (2021, October 28). EEOC launches initiative on artificial intelligence and algorithmic fairness. eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-launches-initiative-artificial-intelligence-and-algorithmic-fairness
Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, called the “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times, helps tech-forward leaders stop overpaying for AI while boosting engagement and innovation. He serves as the CEO of the AI consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, (disasteravoidanceexperts.com) and has written eight books, including The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (2026).
