AI is changing how decisions are made in mission-driven organizations. The question is no longer whether to adopt it. It is whether those decisions still reflect the mission, the values, and the people the organization exists to serve.
Rafeel Wasif is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Portland State University's Mark O. Hatfield School of Government. His research examines AI governance, organizational capacity, and the conditions under which human judgment and automated systems can work together without eroding public purpose.
THE FRAMEWORKS
This research is organized around cointelligence: decisions in organizations are increasingly produced through interaction between human reasoning and machine-generated outputs. Governance, not technology, is the central challenge.
Three failure patterns emerge consistently:
- Algorithmic mission drift — systems optimize for what is measurable, not what the mission requires
- Deliberative atrophy — reliance on AI erodes the organization's capacity to reason independently
- Algorithmic discretion — policy choices embedded in systems that appear technical are governance decisions
The Public Values Audit Matrix (PVAM) evaluates whether AI-mediated decisions remain aligned with fairness, accountability, transparency, and mission fidelity. Where cointelligence explains how decisions are produced, PVAM assesses whether they serve public values.
Organizational maturity assessments examine how AI is embedded in workflows and governance structures. AI skills assessments evaluate whether staff can interpret, question, and exercise judgment alongside AI systems.
Together, these frameworks support intellectual leadership: helping organizations, leaders, and the public understand how AI actually works in ways that are honest, grounded, and accessible.
SELECTED WORK
His forthcoming book, How Mission-Driven Organizations Work with AI: A Cointelligence Framework (with Abhishek Bhati, Edward Elgar), is accompanied by two earlier volumes on civil society, trust, and institutional legitimacy under political pressure — the organizational conditions that resurface when AI enters governance.
The research program has received over $2.5M in competitive funding. Peer-reviewed work appears in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Public Administration, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, VOLUNTAS, and Michigan Technology Law Review, among others. Public scholarship has appeared in the Washington Post, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and The Conversation. Wasif is a Fulbright Fellow and an ARNOVA Emerging Scholar.
Engagements have included the United Nations, City of Portland, Oregon Department of Education, Islamic Relief, and Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
For speaking engagements, advisory work, or research collaboration:
rafeelwasif@gmail.com