Charities that do not engage with artificial intelligence now could face significant future issues, the chair of the Kings Trust warned at an event in London yesterday.
Speaking at NPC Ignites yesterday, Tom Ilube, also a tech entrepreneur, told the audience: “You cannot stay away from this. It is not an option.
“You have got to engage with stuff, because if you don’t, your charity, your organisation, is going to end up in real trouble in two or three years time.
“You’ve got to step into it and find a way to step into it that’s comfortable for you […] Many of you won’t need it, but this is a wake-up call. This is real. It’s not a game.
“This stuff is really, really coming, and it’s going to impact all of our organisations, and we can’t be left behind and let the tech companies dictate to us – we need to step into it.”
Boards should include an AI expert
Boards should also look to include an AI expert in future, Ilube recommended.
He said: “You need someone sitting around the table who has knowledge of AI, and actually a lot of the AI folk out there […] would love to get involved, because they are very excited about what they’re doing, but they also know it’s going to have a societal impact.”
Ilube suggested that these experts could attend board meetings either as an observer or as a trustee, adding: “I think it’s pretty essential that anyone in this world at the moment who’s running an organisation has somebody sitting around the table who is deeply knowledgeable [in AI].”
He later said that there must be more collective action among charities to share resources and strategies about AI more effectively going forward.
“We should be figuring out how we work together to share it. If some are a little bit further ahead, then why not share with others and so fort,” he said.
Citing some of his own experiences of visiting Silicon Valley in the US, Ilube said: “[Big tech companies] know nothing about what you and I do. They really don’t.
“They don’t know the impact of what they’re doing and we do, so, we can sit down across the table [from] them and say ‘Look, this thing you’re doing, it’s brilliant, it’s like magic, it’s amazing… Do you really understand what it’s going to do here?’
“The good thing is, we do really understand, so let’s work together on this, and they’ll be open to those conversations, for sure.
“We collectively can influence those [big tech] organisations if we engage with them. But it’s a real issue that we’ll need to wrestle.”
