Building our seat at the table: Lessons from two years of nonprofit AI exploration

I am an AI skeptic. I am not a computer scientist. In fact, in terms of professional focus I might be considered someone who operates at the complete polar opposite. As a social worker, an educator, and a senior consultant supporting nonprofits at the Community Resource Exchange, my work has always prioritized the relationships and human connections that underlie important change work within organizations. When the idea that AI could support my efforts was presented to me a little over two years ago, I found the premise absurd and even threatening. What place did AI – the technology of algorithms and automation – have in relationship-driven work?

This skepticism has served me well as I started to explore answers to this question. The first (and to this day, most consistent) insights on AI’s expanding utility came from a meeting with UPenn Wharton Professor, Ethan Mollick. His simple invitation to play with the technology for just ten hours – a threshold for understanding how to engage with these tools – was equal parts low-stakes and revelatory. Mollick suggests pushing the boundaries of possibility by challenging AI to tell you how it might support tasks you take on.

What started as a cursory exploration of how AI might be helpful in nonprofit consulting became a paradigm shift: rather than finding a few niche applications for AI in my work, the more I challenged the technology to share how it might support social sector work, the more limitless the possibilities became before me.

As I shared some of my initial findings with consulting colleagues, the need for more intentional exploration became clear. And so, CRE’s AI practice work was born to simultaneously meet the emerging needs and questions of our partners and our CRE team. We sought opportunities to share our insights, and learn from others as they similarly “stepped into the sandbox” through interactive cohort-based programming and consulting engagements.

Two years into this work, I remain an AI skeptic. With growing momentum in AI exploration and adoption in the social sector, and an unsurprising proliferation of for-profit AI capacity-builders and data scientists pushing their services, my lens as a human services professional has, in fact, proven to be incredibly valuable. At CRE, we’ve connected with hundreds of nonprofit professionals, understanding more and more about how the social sector views the risks and impacts of AI, but also how we might best navigate this seismic change in our work (and in the culture of work in general). Three key learning continue to guide our efforts:

1. Keep AI Human-Centered, At All Costs
2. Create Space to Play and Explore Possibilities
3. Learn from the Parallels in AI Exploration and Equity Work

The best way to ensure that AI does not replace the relationship-driven approaches we hold so dear in the social sector is to use AI in ways that actively build human connection. This pushes us to think beyond the efficiencies and time-saved through AI, and consider, for example, how we might leverage these technologies:

• to help frame and structure critical conversations and convenings by using AI to support the development of critical questions and facilitation structures that can strengthen group cohesion and collaboration;
• to refine and ensure fidelity to organizational priorities in program models and service delivery, helping to make more explicit connections between program curricula, service components, and organizational impact;
• to better understand and highlight themes emerging from diverse stakeholder insights by tapping into the AI’s ability to analyze and synthesize data to ensure critical perspectives and community voice is sought and centered so that organizational work is responsive to evolving community needs;
• to inform more accessible and culturally-relevant adaptations of resources and approaches to client engagement, through translation and bias mitigation: using AI to help identify and develop strategies to promote more inclusive service models.

AI tools and technologies certainly were not built with these purposes in mind, but the democratizing impact of being able to make these best-practice approaches available to more resource-constrained organizations cannot be overstated. These tools can support a powerful multiplying effect on our shared ability to create deeper and more sustained impact.

To help our nonprofits clients embrace this moment as a catalyst for meaningful change, we worked together to carve out low-risk spaces for play, exploration, and creativity within their existing work.These opportunities for exploration supported a powerful learning environment where participants were able to follow their curiosity – testing assumptions and ideas – to lay the foundation for change work.

Many come to their AI exploration by viewing this technology as a tool for efficiency in their work. This leads individuals to consider using AI to take on the things that they dread most, with hopes of offloading tedious or time-consuming work (think grant reports and thank you letters or giving feedback). However, by contrast, exploring how AI can support aspects of work that we love most shows us how AI can actually deepen connection with our colleagues, and with community members through our purpose-driven work. Participants in our AI cohort programming who have leaned into this exploration reported some of the greatest shifts in their work. As one of our participants put it: “This has 100% transformed my understanding of the power of AI for my particular space... I feel incredibly empowered to begin to use this tool to expand access and do more impactful work.”

While it’s important to remain clear-eyed about the risks AI poses, creating space for play and curiosity in our exploration of AI establishes a critical parallel process that actually moves us closer to our long term social justice goals. It is in this space that we can create a vision for what might be possible as we partner with AI in our work, and develop new use cases and needed guardrails to ensure these applications remain mission and values-aligned.

As our AI practice grew, we noticed how similar our organizational AI exploration and adoption mirrored how we started and grew our organizational equity and belonging practice. As both of these processes represent a significant piece of change management, it is important that we apply the lessons learned in the pursuit of more equitable systems and outcomes in nonprofit work to the AI context.

• Tension between Expediency and Investment: The common ground between AI and DEIB is that both are polarizing and evoke strong feelings, and that there is a "fear of the unknown" that creates tension, along with the perceived urgency to do something NOW or be left behind. The fear of becoming obsolete in the workplace or their organizations stagnating because of an inability to "keep up with the trends." This leads them to bet on short-term solutions rather than leaning into more difficult, and longer term work that results in deep and lasting transformation. True, sustainable change work requires us to develop a longer term vision for how we want to see our work be different: whether that be in our efforts to better honor and reflect the needs of the communities we work with or the use of technology that continues to center human experiences and engagement.

• Learning and Engagement At All Levels: AI work, much like organizational equity work, can not be the focus of one team member alone. The full impact of this work is only felt if there is a broad-commitment and investment made across all levels of operation - particularly by organizational leadership.

• Critical Reflection and a Shift in Paradigm: A commitment to organizational equity work is a conscious choice to see organizational systems and the work of nonprofits through a different lens – to recognize the unique role that we individually play in affirming or challenging inequity, and to engage critically with beliefs and assumptions that shape our understanding of ourselves in our work. Efforts to adopt AI would do well to follow this example: In the future we are racing toward, what might need to change in how we approach our work? Spaces to explore these big questions and our shifting reality are rare and increasingly important.

• Working Towards a More Just and Equitable Future: We are familiar with cautionary research on how AI could potentially deepen systemic inequities within American society. But how might we enlist AI as a critical tool in preventing that reality? It is important to call AI out for its mistakes, biases, or oversights – we can, and should, do this when we confront these harmful inaccuracies within an AI session. AI is learning from us, and by engaging with it – and consistently correcting it – we are continuing to train it.

For the sake of the missions we believe in so dearly, our collective ability to adopt innovation, and raise our voices in this moment – sharing our hopes, our questions, and our concerns for what AI will mean in our work – are of existential importance.

We can and should own a certain level of expertise and agency to determine how AI tools should (and should not) be applied. Negating our “expertise” and agency as social sector professionals in this case could have dire consequences, as our silence will be filled with the perspectives of technology developers and corporate profiteers who will tell us how AI should be used in nonprofit work (more than likely, to their benefit not ours). This positioning inspired a level of cautious confidence in our AI cohort participants, where they felt empowered to speak with authority on the aspects of AI engagement that felt aligned with their work or not. If AI learns, then it should learn from us – as experts in our lives, our work, our missions.

In this moment, when AI is rapidly reshaping our world and loneliness and disconnection are on the rise, a human-centered approach is not just important – it’s essential. The social sector’s deep commitment to relationship, care, and community may be one of the most vital contributions we can offer to humanity in the age of AI. Our ways of working, our values, and our voices are urgently needed to shape how technology evolves and to ensure it serves the well-being of all people.

If you want to become part of our growing community of nonprofit explorers, dreamers, and creators, we invite you to join our next AI Bootcamp cohort, set to launch in January 2026. Your AI questions, concerns, and ideas are welcome here as we build our seat at the table together!