According to the 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report from Virtuous and Fundraising.AI, 92% of nonprofits are already using AI in some capacity. Only 7% report major improvements in their ability to achieve their mission. Most nonprofits have already kicked the tires on AI. Now they’re trying to figure out where it actually belongs in the work.
AI is already built into many of the tools people use every day, often as part of software their organizations were paying for anyway. Access to another feature does not automatically create more capacity for the mission. Teams have to look at the recurring tasks, handoffs, decisions, and relationship moments that make up the work and decide where AI can genuinely help.
That was the focus of a recent conversation our CEO, Trent Ricker, and I had on the Go Beyond Fundraising Podcast. We talked through eight practical ways to put AI to work: four habits individuals can build into their own day and four organizational workflows worth rethinking.
Throughout the conversation, we kept coming back to three kinds of work: hands, head, and heart.
A Practical Question Before You Automate
A colleague I met through the NTEN AI community, Remy Reya, shared three questions that can be asked about any task: Does it need hands, head, or heart? I like the framework because it keeps the conversation grounded in the work.
Hands is the repetitive, manual work that does not require someone’s judgment. Pulling a segment from a spreadsheet and uploading it into another system is hands work. AI or automation may be able to handle it.
Head is the thinking. How should new donors be segmented? Which factors matter? AI can help surface options, organize information, and challenge assumptions. A person still makes the decision.
Heart is the human connection. A thank-you note that needs warmth and specificity. A conversation with a donor who has been giving for twenty years. Those moments belong to people.
At AGP, we use these questions when we look at client workflows and our own. They help us see where AI can improve efficiency, raise quality, or give people more time for the moments that need them most. You do not need to be an AI expert to do this. You need to understand the work well enough to see what each step requires.
Four Ways to Use AI in Your Own Work
It is easier to redesign organizational workflows once people have felt the difference in their own work. These four habits are a practical place to start because they make AI useful without asking anyone to change everything at once.
1. Make AI Your Default Note-Taker
I used to take careful notes in meetings, and it cost me the meeting. I would be writing and miss what came next, ask someone to repeat themselves, or lose the thread entirely. Taking notes is hands work, and it was pulling my attention away from the conversation.
AI note-taking tools have become much more useful in a short period of time. They no longer just transcribe what was said. They organize notes by topic, list open questions and tasks, and pull out key decisions. If a decision gets made in half a sentence midway through a call, it can still show up clearly in the summary at the top of your meeting notes.
That turns your meeting history into something more useful than a folder of transcripts. Before the next recurring meeting, you can ask what was discussed last time, what got decided, and what is still open. You can set standing weekly prompts that update next week’s agenda based on last week’s notes. You can also build your to-do list across multiple meeting notes, so tasks do not disappear between calls.
One norm to set before any of this: disclose that you are recording. At AGP, the expectation is that meetings get recorded unless someone opts out. When you are working with people outside your organization, ask permission first.
2. Use AI as a Thought Partner, Not a Search Engine
Most people open an AI tool and type a question the way they would type into a search bar. Ask, receive an answer, close the tab. Trent suggested a different way to work with AI on the podcast. Treat your AI tool like someone who works with you and for you. You would not hand a new colleague a task without explaining the goal, the background, and who it is for, and this is no different. That is head work, and it only works if you give AI something to work with.
“AI is only going to be as helpful as you give it access to the information that you’ve already created.“
Trent ricker, CEO at AGP
Donor preparation is a good example. A major gift officer can share giving history, notes from past conversations, and recent engagement, then ask what questions to raise, what is missing from the picture, and which assumptions need testing.
You can also tell AI to ask you questions instead of answering right away, just like you would with a colleague who needs more context. That back and forth can pull out information you would not have thought to include.
You can give AI different roles and let it push your thinking in different ways. Ask it to read your email draft as a CEO or project manager to see how it lands with different audiences. Ask it to argue the other side so you can test your assumptions. That is where AI becomes useful for judgment rather than just speed.
3. Talk Instead of Type
People speak far faster than they type. Every major AI tool now has a dictation feature, and dedicated tools such as Whisper Flow and Super Whisper work across other applications.
You do not have to be organized about it. You can dump everything in your head, wander off on a tangent, come back, and contradict yourself. The tools handle the cleanup. They catch inflection well enough to tell a question from a statement, remove the pauses, and turn it into something coherent. This is hands work in service of your head.
I was shopping for a car recently and talked through every feature I wanted and why each one mattered, including a few nice-to-haves and things that occurred to me along the way. AI organized my thoughts, helped me prioritize the features I really wanted, suggested things I had missed, and gave me a list of questions to ask the dealer. The main benefit was that I could simply think out loud, and AI turned those ramblings into an organized project brief.
4. Look for AI in the Platforms You Already Use
If your organization runs on Microsoft or Google, Copilot or Gemini is already inside Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and your inbox, and it is increasingly appearing in CRMs and other software systems.
I am not a PowerPoint person. We have a template, and I need slides that convey the message rather than slides that win awards. Now I describe what I need, and Copilot asks whether a section should be three columns, a table, or a graphic. The formatting follows the brand template, the slide order makes sense, and I do not have to become a PowerPoint expert for something I rarely do.
The same is true in Excel. I recently asked for a summary across four worksheets, requested a chart, and then asked Copilot to check its own calculations and show its work so I could verify the results.
Working inside the tools you already use is often the easiest way to make AI part of the workflow instead of another destination.
Four Ways to Rethink How Your Organization Works
Once you start noticing the hands, head, and heart in your own day, you begin to see the same pattern across the organization.
Pick one recurring workflow and walk it from beginning to end. Mark the steps that are hands, head, or heart. Look for repetitive work that can be automated, thinking that AI can support, and relationship moments that need a person.
These four areas are good places to begin.
1. Walk Through a Fundraising Workflow
Start with something that happens all the time. When a new donor gives for the first time, what happens next?
Some of the workflow is probably automated already. A welcome email goes out. AI can help make that message more relevant by accounting for gift size, donor type, recency, and how the person found you. A first-time $25 online gift and a first-time $5,000 event gift should not receive the same message.
The team still decides how to segment donors and which factors matter. It also decides which donors should come out of the automated flow because the relationship deserves a person. Those exceptions are part of the workflow design.
The result is straightforward: more donors receive something relevant, and the people who need personal attention still get it.
2. Strengthen Stewardship and Personalization
Gift officers are building real relationships and AI can help them prepare.
With access to appropriate notes and CRM history, AI can summarize how a relationship has progressed, what has already been discussed, what the giving history looks like, and what may be worth raising next. It can also help capture what happened in a conversation and identify what to carry into the next one.
The fundraiser still walks into the conversation as themselves. They are simply better prepared.
3. Accelerate Grant Research and Preparation
One of the most time-consuming parts of grant writing is figuring out where to invest your effort in the first place.
Give AI an accurate picture of your organization and ask it to identify foundations whose funding history aligns with your mission. It can review publicly available information, analyze previously funded projects, and help surface opportunities that may otherwise take hours to uncover manually.
It can also help you compare funders, identify common themes across successful grants, and highlight which of your programs may be the strongest fit for a particular opportunity.
What AI gives you is a better starting point. Instead of spending your time searching through websites and grant databases, you start with a shortlist that is already organized around your mission.
The review, strategy, and final decisions still belong to your team. Verify eligibility requirements, funding priorities, deadlines, and submission instructions before acting on any recommendation.
Used thoughtfully, AI can reduce the time spent researching opportunities and give your team more time to focus on building strong proposals and funder relationships.
4. Look at Your Internal Operations
Some of the best uses of AI are invisible outside the organization. They remove work that is necessary but does not make good use of a person’s time.
Our client contracts include data-retention requirements, so files tied to a project must come off SharePoint at the 180-day mark. For a long time, that meant someone finished their actual job and then opened folder after folder looking for files that had aged out.
We now use AI to find those files, generate a list, and send it to a person for approval. We stay compliant, and that person gets the afternoon back.
Your organization probably has its own versions of these workflows: a case manager retyping intake notes instead of sitting with clients, a development team reformatting the same data between systems, or a program director with outcome data and no time to analyze it before a board meeting.
Many of these problems are solvable now. Each one is an opportunity to give someone back time they would rather spend on the mission.
Start With One Workflow
Look at one familiar workflow and ask better questions:
- Which steps need hands?
- Which need head?
- Which need heart?
- What repetitive work can be automated?
- Where can AI improve the thinking?
- Where is a person essential?
Trent put it this way on the podcast:
“We’re not looking for AI to replace the human. We’re looking for AI to help us be more efficient so we can use more of our time to be human with our supporters and our constituents.”
The hours that come back are the point. They can go toward deeper donor relationships, stronger stewardship, better planning, or the work your mission depends on.
Pick the workflow that annoys your team the most. Start there.
This blog is based on an episode of the Go Beyond Fundraising Podcast. Listen here.
