Over the past couple of weeks, I have written about some potential effects that AI will have on the nonprofit sector. Today, I’m going to end this series on how we as a company intend to use AI.
There’s no doubt there is a certain “wow-factor” using AI. It’s like Star Trek fiction coming to life. Simply give a prompt to an AI tool, and within seconds it responds with pages of generated text.
However, there is debate on whether the value of that output is worth the hype.
Given my skepticism, we are going to be very cautious on how we employ this new technology. It’s really a question of the risk/return of using AI and balancing innovation with responsibility.
If you’ve read this blog series, you have seen how we have used AI to provide draft reports on things I needed to learn about. Pretty low risk proposition (how many people read my blogs, LOL). But we will never just “roll out” with any AI output without doing significant editing and validating because AI doesn’t always provide accurate output.
We will also use AI to summarize the work we have done. I find it helpful and a time saver to ask AI to write executive summaries on our completed projects. It’s a good way to check to make sure we are communicating the important stuff.
Another use we have found helpful is translating code. Our company uses specialized software called SPSS. More common in our space is the software SQL. With AI, we can quickly convert scripts from one language to the other Now, like any output generated by AI, it needs proofreading and validation before going live. But starting with a draft of AI translated code is a time saver.
What we will not do, nor ever do, is simply loading a client’s donor database into an AI tool and prompt, “analyze this.” Of course, AI can’t do that yet. Yet. But even if it could, I wouldn’t trust the output. Plus, as described in a previous blog, I would not risk putting client data into an environment that is a black box regarding privacy policies.
This seven-blog series has just scratched the surface on all AI could do, and what the risks could be for the nonprofit sector. While AI can be a helpful tool, I’m not ready to yield our methodological approach and tools to fully adopt AI. Bottom line, it’s not ready for prime time.
Yet.