Nonprofits are embracing AI faster than they are planning for it. Fortune's John Kell reported on October 21 on a survey of 917 industry leaders and staff, published in September by the Bridgespan Group and the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network.
The survey findings
Seven in ten nonprofits believe AI offers meaningful opportunities. Only 8% have a formal implementation roadmap for the next one to two years, and AI is built into the workflows of just 4%. Per Nonprofit Impact Matters, 92% of nonprofits operate on less than $1 million a year. Industry insiders say some donors are pushing nonprofits to use AI so their spending is more effective, while staff wariness about AI's societal and environmental effects complicates adoption.
How five organizations are approaching it
At the American Cancer Society, CEO Shane Jacobson is drafting a strategic roadmap and hopes for board approval by November. The group is piloting Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic's Claude, has deployed a medical content translation tool and has authorized legal contract tools from Sirion and Harvey AI. Jacobson says the goal is “a tool that's meant to be tied to the mission and governed responsibly.” Compass Pro Bono offers AI tools from OpenAI and Perplexity and provides training without mandating use; director of AI Remy Reya says, “We really encourage people to share their roadblocks and their failures.”
City Year's AI roadmap focuses on enhancing tutoring and mentorship rather than replacing humans, with guardrails and pilots before wider rollout. A personalization planning tool in one district showed 70% less planning time and a 30% academic improvement, according to CEO Jim Balfanz. Hopeworks partnered with Dell Technologies to run large language models locally, and CEO Dan Rhoton says AI has been a supercharger for better jobs and higher wages. At Plant-for-the-Planet, CTO Sagar Aryal says some staff oppose AI over water consumption, while others use it for translation, documents, data extraction and automating international donor payments.
The takeaway
The pattern in the article is enthusiasm without structure: interest is broad, formal plans are rare, and the organizations furthest along tie AI to a specific mission and test tools before scaling them.
Source: Fortune. This is an AI Business Watch summary of the original report.