Until Claude can run a sausage sizzle, here’s how not-for-profits can benefit from AI

Artificial intelligence has a number of uses, and it can provide not-for-profits with useful assistance in a number of areas. Let’s face it, though: the reason the world is currently pouring a trillion dollars into building and running AI models isn’t that they improve business performance, except as a waystation. The promise is that they will enable companies to slash costs by slashing staff numbers.

For we soft-hearted not-for-profits (NFPs), that sounds bad. The spectre of mass unemployment, or even local unemployment, or even individuals packing up their desks after years at the company, raises concerns. Still, companies have goals – making money for the shareholders, primarily – that can balance or override their commitment to their workers, and not-for-profits have goals that can override those responsibilities not only financially but also morally. If you’re working to promote the interests of people with disability, their best interests have precedence over those of the helpers, however dedicated those may be.

We’ve been through similar technological upheavals before, after all, and society has adjusted. The very oldest among us can remember the era of the typing pool, a period of approximately 80 years when managers dictated letters to be typed up by secretaries, corrected, retyped, corrected again with white-out and scribble, and eventually snail-mailed out. Computerisation eliminated all that work, and after some perturbation the sector of women who used to be corralled into secretarial work erupted into the management positions they’d been excluded from and there were more women in employment, not fewer.

There are certainly going to be upheavals now, and economic consequences, and a need for governments to intervene to maximise benefits and minimise harms, but what does that mean, specifically, for your own NFP? How are you going to deal with the HR issues that will arise?

There are several layers of prediction involved here. Will there be large job losses across the economy, or is AI (this year, at least, or this decade) a speculative bubble? If there are job losses, will your NFP be caught up? If your community group can cut staff numbers, should you?

Looking at smaller NFPs in particular – those without their own HR divisions, say – there are a few extra factors to consider. One is how much of your work involves the hands-on human interaction that AI can only feint at (ignore those cartwheeling robots: false advertising). Drafting letters, AI can do; changing incontinence pads, no, not now, not for the foreseeable future. It’s a spectrum: where does your organisation fall?

One factor that’s peculiar to the NFP sector is that a lot of the work is done by volunteers. Laying off a volunteer gains you very little – the amount of staff time it takes to organise and regulate them – and can lose you quite a lot. Volunteers are not simply meat-based robots. For the group you’re helping, they provide human contact, friendship, and problem-solving skills. For the organisation, they provide the first circle of the people you can call on to promote your image, defend your importance, and even finance your budget.