Artificial intelligence (AI) is the shiny object that everyone keeps talking about, but folks have been using AI to get tasks done faster and more efficiently since the first electronic calculators debuted more than a half-century ago. Whether you work in healthcare philanthropy, human services, or another field of nonprofit work, it’s all but certain you and your team are also using AI for day-to-day work, even if it’s just for computation or as a grammar and spell check tool.
Seemingly overnight, AI is becoming the equivalent of a co-worker capable of autonomously performing functions such as proofreading, translation, transcription, data analysis and more with minimal direction from the user, according to three expert panelists hosted during a recent The NonProfit Times and Wiland webinar.
“AI also gets smarter the more you use it,” noted Kelley Hecht, a New York City-based team lead of industry advisors at Amazon Web Services for Nonprofits headquartered in Seattle. The growth in machine learning capabilities is now birthing a plethora of new AI applications that has taken even some of the most seasoned tech gurus by surprise. With the number of these applications increasing exponentially almost by the day, you need not be the first to adopt these tools but should start setting up guardrails now for when you do, according to all three experts.
“I remember three or four years ago talking about how AI was transforming marketing and fundraising and saying how content and creative would likely be influenced by this AI thing at some point but that it’s a long way off. I did not anticipate what 2023 alone would bring in terms of what’s now possible with content and creative,” said Dave Raley, founder of Imago Consulting, a consultancy to nonprofits and businesses in Poulsbo, Washington.
Advanced bias screening and plagiarism detection tools are expanding the possibilities further, with increasingly sophisticated chatbots that can compose emails and brainstorm in real time with team members in a distributed work environment. Donor segmentation models that can tell you which donors to contact in what channel at what time and predict the likelihood that they’ll respond with a gift are another example.
All this has created a palpable sense of both excitement and unease among nonprofit leaders, who recognize AI’s potential to be a force multiplier but fret about being left behind if they aren’t early adopters. Counterintuitively, some also worry about the unintended consequences of adopting too early before all the kinks have been worked out and wasting time and resources in the process.
To determine how AI can best help you in the short term, Hecht recommended you start small by identifying those day-to-day tasks that you or your team find most burdensome or that aren’t getting done with the effectiveness or rigor they demand and exploring what tools might be available to help. However, just as a motorist has an obligation to maintain their vehicle and drive responsibly, “it is important to recognize that as with anything technical, you also have a responsibility. The technology will never be completely independent of the human,” Hecht said.
This makes it incumbent on leaders to be proactive in establishing guardrails and rules of the road sooner than later. In a healthcare setting, this might include safeguards to prevent patients’ private health information or other personally identifiable data from being input into these tools. It might also include rules against plagiarizing copyrighted content in marketing materials. Terms of service should always be vetted as well. Still, said Raley, “my recommendation would be to keep the guidelines simple and not put too much bureaucracy around experimenting with AI for your teams or individuals.”
The good news is that the barriers to entry for many of these tools are quite low in an open-source environment. “It’s easy for newbies to get daunted,” said Cameron Popp, vice president for solutions and innovation at digital marketing company Wiland in Niwot, Colorado. “But there are many free or virtually free tools available to absolutely everybody that you can literally log into today for the price of an email address to create an account and start playing and experimenting and understanding what’s happening.”
