In this week’s Nonprofit Innovators in AI podcast my podcast partner Taylor Shanklin joins me for a practical sidebar into the question - Is AI real or hype? 

It turns out that plenty of people are making lots of noise about AI in the nonprofit sector. By noise, I mean pitching new products, announcing new applications, getting funding for all of that, and some nonprofits are standing up and saying … we did this with AI and it worked. Those various things are normal parts of the technology maturation process and generally, make one believe that there is a there there for AI and nonprofits.

But, many of you - listeners - are making or at least are being asked to make strategic decisions about whether and what your organization should invest in when it comes to AI. And we get it, that can be a pretty tough question, particularly because AI is pretty complex and for many of us it hasn’t been around for very long. So there isn’t much in the way of common knowledge about it in and around the industry, case studies demonstrating that it works, and more generally, proof. Plain and simple, the question that we get most typically from our listeners is - does it really work?

So, that’s the topic we cover in today’s episode. And we do that by answering four key questions about the technology - Where did AI technology come from? What types of problems is it good at solving? How do I know if it is working? And where is it going from here?

With those answers, we hope that you’ll be better prepared when the inevitable questions surface in your organization about AI. Now you’ll be equipped to cut through the hype and find the best use of this technology for your group.

Enjoy this week’s episode.