Artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every industry, from finance to health care to retail. Breakthroughs in drug discovery, medical imaging, and precision agriculture that enable scientists to predict early-stage drug performance and suggest optimal timing for farmers to plant crops highlight the sweeping potential of this technology. Yet, in philanthropy—and specifically in grantmaking—such transformation has been slow to arrive. Many in the sector are watching the AI revolution with a mix of curiosity and caution—intrigued by its promise but underwhelmed by the lack of practical tools and proven use cases.
The potential for AI to transform grantmaking
While AI has enhanced personal productivity and streamlined workflows, few AI solutions reflect the real-world challenges of grantmaking, where success depends on relationships, equity, and trust. For example, AI has yet to offer solutions that help funders navigate power imbalances, build long-term relationships with grantees, or adopt reporting and evaluation practices that consider cultural context and community voice.
The question is: Why hasn’t the “AI moment” arrived to transform grantmaking, and what will it take to unlock AI’s deep potential in philanthropy? Imagine a future where AI can surface and elevate marginalized communities’ issues and voices, connect the dots between seemingly disparate social and cultural issues, and offer innovative solutions to our most intractable problems.
Why grantmakers are treading carefully with AI
Grantmakers often find themselves in a delicate balancing act. While there’s broad consensus among practitioners that the world faces urgent and complex challenges, there’s also a deep sensitivity to the risks of doing unintended harm. Many in the field recognize that the wealth behind philanthropic giving is often connected to the very systems and inequities that philanthropy now seeks to address—prompting a thoughtful and highly cautious approach to action.
AI carries both great promise and enormous risk. We can imagine a future where AI doesn’t just boost efficiency or expand capacity but tackles the world’s most persistent and complex challenges. At the same time, we’re well aware of the real harms already caused by biased algorithms and flawed data. Among the many grantmakers I partner with, there’s a gnawing concern that, despite our best intentions, AI will create more problems than it solves.
And so, grantmakers are studying the landscape, weighing every implication, and exercising caution as they consider how best to integrate AI in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and effective.
What’s missing: A bold, shared vision for AI to transform grantmaking
Beyond concerns about potential harm, both practitioners and tech vendors have yet to bring real creativity to AI use cases in philanthropy. So far, we’ve seen chatbots, matchmaking algorithms, document summarizers, application assistants, and other tools that offer improvements in workflow and efficiency—helpful, but not transformative. A truly compelling use case for AI to transform grantmaking, one that reimagines how we approach problem solving or fundamentally reshapes the grantmaking process, has yet to emerge.
So, how should we envision AI’s role in philanthropy, specifically grantmaking? Imagine AI as a convening force that identifies shared priorities across different types of grantmakers, surfaces bold ideas, and helps generate new collaborations in real time. Or a system that empowers communities to articulate their own needs, then maps the funders and nonprofits best positioned to respond.
For example, what if a tool existed for nonprofits, community leaders, and individuals to describe challenges in their communities using any format they like—written, photos, videos, interviews, personal anecdotes, and project proposals. AI could take this information and combine it with open government and grantmaking data to help contextualize the issue. It could identify private, community, corporate, or government grantmakers and match them with nonprofits and community members based on shared interests or theories of change. It could identify interventions and strategies or suggest a collaborative funding model along with ideas on how best to approach the issue.
These aren’t enhancements to existing tools; they represent a fundamental shift in how we design, connect, and act.
Grants managers and administrators often lack the time and space to think broadly about how AI could enable us to reimagine grantmaking. And tech vendors are hesitant to develop features and functions for an audience that is not yet receptive to a reimagined philanthropy.
Building the future of grantmaking, together
The “AI moment” to transform grantmaking won’t arrive until grantmakers and technology providers become co-creators, working together to envision new and more powerful ways to deliver social impact. Grantmakers don’t need to see themselves as passive adopters of pre-packaged AI; they can take a proactive role as co-designers shaping tools that reflect the values and complexities of their work.
One way to jumpstart this co-creation is through cross-sector innovation labs, where grantmakers, tech vendors, and nonprofit staff can work together to build and safely test prototypes without high stakes. Funders could create pooled resources to support the development of AI tools tailored to grantmaking, while vendors offer collaborative sandboxes for iteration and learning. These pilots don’t need to be perfect; they just need to be possible.
Tech vendors, meanwhile, need to spark creativity and design thinking across the sector, building tools with empathy for users and grounding them in the frontline expertise of nonprofits and the lived experience of the communities they serve. That means centering nonprofits and community voices, and investing in discovery work, listening sessions, and partnerships that reward experimentation.
The potential of AI is to enable the sector to reimagine philanthropy, not simply automate it. Imagine AI that elevates grassroots voices too often missed in traditional application processes, or that brings together aligned funders and changemakers to pioneer entirely new theories of change. These breakthroughs require models that treat AI not only as a tool for doing things faster, but as a collaboration partner for doing them differently.
Ultimately, unlocking AI’s transformative potential in philanthropy will require not only funding but also long-term commitment, creativity, and imagination on the part of grantmakers, tech vendors, nonprofits, and communities. It will also require deep listening among all stakeholders—being fully present, withholding judgment, and creating space for the speaker’s emotions, experiences, and unspoken meanings to emerge. AI can help us envision and implement entirely new approaches to our work—if grantmakers, changemakers, communities, and tech vendors build AI solutions aligned to our collective mission. Progress won’t come from waiting for the perfect use case; it will come from building the future of philanthropy together one step at a time.
Photo credit: gorodenkoff via Getty Images
The post Why we’re still waiting for the ‘AI moment’ that will transform grantmaking appeared first on Candid insights.
