Q&A: How Mission-Driven Nonprofits Leverage AI to Achieve Social Good

BIZTECH: What are you seeing as the biggest opportunities for nonprofits as they experiment with AI?

The way AI used to work is you would train a model to do something very specific. Quill, for example, would take a paragraph and build a model specifically for that paragraph on teaching students how to engage with it, and it taught the model how to react to different responses from students. The AI was trained specifically on that model. And now it’s becoming possible for AI to do more complex tasks by stitching together those individual things. So, the hope is that it’s more useful for a wide variety of problems and tasks.

Another AI-powered nonprofit, Digital Green started by going to farms and showing videos in the local language to help farmers improve their farming practices. Now it provides them much more customized advice from a mobile device that’s intelligent and works real time. So, I think we’ll see that in a lot of places.

This is the dream of the AI optimists — for AI to improve our global well-being. In Fast Forward’s new 2025 AI for Humanity Report, we found that 84% of AI-powered nonprofit respondents said funding would most help them further develop and scale AI. This is important because the data shows a clear relationship between resources and reach. At the smallest budgets, AI-powered nonprofits are serving thousands, a median of just under 2,000 lives. By the time budgets cross $1 million, median reach jumps to half a million people. And at more than $5 million, AI-powered nonprofits  impact a median of 7 million lives.

BIZTECH: How are nonprofits accessing these tools? Are they building them in-house or using off-the-shelf solutions?

We see a mix. Most AI-powered nonprofits start with off-the-shelf tools to get up and running quickly, then move to in-house solutions once they’ve proven that the approach is worth deeper investment. For example, Digital Green initially piloted its farmer chat feature using an existing platform, and later built its own version.

Even when using pre-made tools, most nonprofits customize them to meet the unique needs of their communities. Ultimately, they don’t focus on AI for its own sake — they care about the impact it has.

Nonprofits are problem-driven: they start with a specific challenge and choose the technology that best helps them solve it. Unlike tech companies, which often aim to build broadly scalable products, nonprofits focus on solutions that fit their mission and users.

Ethics, privacy, and bias are also top of mind. According to our research, 61% of surveyed AI-powered nonprofits customize large language models with their own data to better serve their communities, and 70% regularly incorporate community feedback into system updates.

BIZTECH: What lessons can other nonprofits learn from these use cases, given that they want to be careful about bias and privacy, and that what they do has to fit their mission?

The nonprofits successfully working with AI have built guardrails. For example, CareerVillage, a career coaching tool, keeps humans in the loop.

Humans review the information that the AI coach provides to make sure that it’s relevant and accurate for the students. It’s a big improvement on the previous best-possible scenario. Rather than students waiting for humans to provide the answers, CareerVillage provides real-time, high-quality advice that’s tailored to students’ needs.

BIZTECH: What are some things nonprofits need to do before they start to layer in AI agents to make sure that that those guardrails are in place?

Ultimately, AI outputs are only as good as the data and practices behind them. We advise nonprofits to make responsible AI practices crystal clear. Showing commitment to data privacy, security, and ethical development builds trust and transparency. This includes curating datasets that reflect the experience of users, conducting bias testing designed to uncover and correct for patterns that may signal inequity, and soliciting regular feedback directly from the community.

Digital Green, for example has decades of experience supporting farmers, and the organization’s leaders want to bring the best resources and tools to that community. That’s their North Star.

And over time, that’s changed from bringing screens to the field to doing YouTube videos to now AI agents that can speak the farmer’s language. But at the root of it is really understanding the needs of the beneficiaries and the community.

BIZTECH:  Nonprofits have a lot of brilliant minds working in them, but they are resource-constrained. How can they keep up?

The social sector eats last at the table of technology and innovation, and so they’re the last to reap the benefits of all these new tools that come to market. That’s why AI-powered nonprofits represent one of the most promising fronts in social impact. We’ve seen firsthand how a single nonprofit can leverage AI to unlock opportunity for millions: from helping refugees access translations, to scaling personalized learning, to strengthening climate resilience.

Mission-driven organizations are set up to serve a beneficiary and put people first. The onus is on the philanthropic community to kickstart AI in the nonprofit sector by resourcing early-stage development, prioritizing responsible use, and backing collaboration.