You Need an AI-First Nonprofit

I stumbled upon well-known nonprofit consultant Beth Kanter’s excellent blog post from earlier this year on people-first AI. It’s worth a read, and I agree with almost everything she says. She proposes an AI adoption journey for community benefit organizations, stresses the importance of culture change as I do in my own training, encourages experimentation and emphasizes the benefits to tedious workflows.

One sentence with which I disagree stood out: “AI cannot do someone’s job from A to Z; it is more of a joint effort known as ‘copiloting.’”

Here’s an unpopular opinion: there will be some jobs in some organizations that can be replaced entirely by artificial intelligence. The larger the organization, the more specialized positions tend to become. Some of these more specialized jobs can be handled entirely by AI.

I’m already seeing this happen in the for-profit world. Just this week, a Pittsburgh area newsroom replaced an entire production staff team with AI tools. And these changes are coming to community benefit organizations whether they like it or not.

If you’re on the board or in senior leadership positions at a nonprofit, you need to be thinking about these implications now. You will likely find immense productivity and effectiveness benefits to AI tools, but you also face the threat of declining employee morale. Staff will not perform well when they feel their jobs are threatened, get confused about what AI really is, resent lack of training and see senior leadership failing to take the lead.

Last year, the Pew Research Center published a startling statistic on how skeptical most Americans are about AI. I don’t think attitudes have changed much. Two weeks ago, I spoke to a Chief Development Officer at a nonprofit on the small end of the middle market. She told me her CEO doesn’t believe in AI, doesn’t trust it and won’t allow employees to use it.

I think that’s a recipe for disaster.

Over time, the CEO’s team will either start using AI tools behind her back, start to resent the lack of exposure to a tool they need to learn, or simply leave.

A better approach is to start with some simple education. I’m excited to launch a free nonprofit AI training channel today that I hope will help, but there are many great training resources out there: NTEN (click to filter on AI), LinkedIn Learning, DataforDev, the Center for AI Learning at Emory University, and Microsoft’s Introduction to AI Skills for Nonprofits just to name a few.

The best approach of all is to make your organization an AI-first organization. Foster a sense of creativity and experimentation, and reward people who learn to use AI in innovative ways. Then use the momentum to look more systematically at how you can reduce tedious or unnecessary work, make processes more efficient, improve the customer experience and ultimately foster innovation.