The charity sector must prepare its workforce for a future with artificial intelligence in it, a digital expert has said.
Speaking at NCVO’s online AGM yesterday, Charity AI Task Force chair Zoe Amar said that the future belonged to three groups of people: those who make AI tools, those able to use them successfully, and those whose roles cannot be replaced by the technology.
She said that the sector needed to decide where it will sit within these groups, as the “seismic forces” of AI will influence everything that charities do in future.
A report from Phoenix Software and NCVO published today found that most charities surveyed were already using AI in day-to-day operations, with several others planning to adopt it.
Meanwhile, a separate report this week from PR agency Tank found that annual growth in traffic to charity websites from Google searches had slowed from 15% to 12.5% since the rise of AI-powered search.
‘AI disruption will concentrate inequalities’
Amar warned that the advent of AI technologies may “concentrate” the rising inequalities in society, even though the charity sector “may not have a great deal more resources” to address this.
“We’re going to have to cherry-pick where we focus,” said Amar, who called for “more collaboration and better data sharing” across the sector, as the sector missed opportunities to spot inequalities “when we work in siloes”.
Amar, who previously called for the government to allow the charity sector to play a crucial role as part of its AI Opportunities Action Plan, noted that “we’re still in the foothills of all the change we’re going to see” as a result of the technology.
Citing examples such as charities using AI to help write funding applications, Amar said that the fundamental modes of operation in the likes of fundraising are “already starting to look very different” and will evolve in “ways we barely can imagine today”.
Amar said the charity sector needed “to plan for the future of our workforce urgently” to protect its employees from any adverse effects of the new technology, but also noted that this was a conversation “we are not having in the sector”.
She cautioned that the sector “must not make kneejerk cuts based solely on costs” to services based on AI automation.
“We must use AI to augment the fantastic talented people we have in the sector, not just automate them,” Amar said. “Our sector’s superpower is human connection.”
To preserve this connection, Amar advised that “we need new partnerships across all of the sector” that are “ethical, inclusive and fundamentally human”.
