Donations meet disruption: Nonprofits navigate the AI era with mix of enthusiasm and anxiety

[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and agents. See coverage of our related event.]

Project C.U.R.E. had the answers. Decades of repair manuals for X-ray machines, anesthesia equipment and other medical devices — plus inventory data for the 250 semi-truck containers of supplies it ships to clinics worldwide every year. The problem was access: the archives had grown too large for any one person to navigate.

Now the nonprofit is turning to AI to start unlocking those resources, using the technology to predict future supply needs and search its manuals database for specific fixes.

“We’ve got almost 40 years of manuals,” said Doug Jackson, CEO of Project C.U.R.E., a Denver nonprofit providing medical aid. “There’s no way that any one person can sit down in a room and read through all those manuals. But AI can.”

Project C.U.R.E. was among 1,500 organizations in Bellevue, Wash., last week for Microsoft’s Global Nonprofit Leadership Summit, which centered on a high-stakes paradox for the social sector. The event’s focus was accelerated AI adoption and agentic tools, but the move toward automation keeps running into the gap between the technology’s potential and the real costs, skills and time required to deploy it.

Children International, a Kansas City-based organization serving impoverished youth, found a way to bridge that divide. Its employees are using AI agents to automate tasks including bulk translation of the letters sent from donors to children receiving their support.

“We had to do something different,” said Tim Batcha, vice president of Global Information Technology at Children International, speaking at the summit. He explained that too much effort was going toward day-to-day operations instead of advancing the nonprofit’s core mission.

To help others eager to deploy AI, the tech giant last Wednesday unveiled Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers, which expands the company’s Elevate program launched last July.

The initiative has three components:

• “AI for Nonprofits” credential: The professional certificate created with LinkedIn and NetHope develops skills applicable for this specific sector.
• AI skills training: Live and on-demand instruction modules are focused on nonprofit needs and target areas such as Microsoft Copilot’s agentic tools, change management and responsible AI governance.
• Changemaker Fellowship: The program creates a global cohort supporting fellows deploying AI in their operations and is funded by Microsoft, EY, Caribou and others.

Inclusion and anxiety

Changemakers aims to address challenges Microsoft own leaders’ repeatedly acknowledged at the summit — that while AI is likely to be one of the most influential technologies of this era, it’s also creating widespread concerns around job loss and other community impacts and threatens to further widen tech inequities worldwide.

“This defining moment of our time can either be more inclusive or it can be less inclusive based on the decisions that we make in rooms like this all around the world,” said Justin Spelhaug, director of Microsoft Elevate, addressing attendees.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said that one of the best ways to overcome fears and build support for AI is to get people using the technology at home and in their work.

“Anxiety, especially in the United States, has reached people before AI has,” Smith said.

The company has committed to providing more than $5 billion in support for nonprofits over the next year alone through discounts and donations of its technology, as well as grants.

In an interview with GeekWire, Spelhaug pointed to two key operations where AI is likely to have the greatest impact for nonprofits:

• Answering calls from the people served by the organizations to answer basic questions and address straightforward needs, replacing automated phone systems with a “press 1, press 2” menu.
• Improving fundraising by tracking donor information, providing personalized communications and supporting lead follow ups.

“There’s no shortage of problems in the world to solve,” Spelhaug said. “Let’s get people solving those problems and AI taking care of the work that it can take care of.”

AI ambitions and experiments

Seattle-based Evergreen Goodwill is testing AI as a tool for managing the millions of pounds of donated apparel and household goods every year that it sells or tries to recycle.

The century-old nonprofit was selected last year as an AI for Good Lab grant recipient and is using the funds to pilot the use of AI in pricing some of the roughly 26 million items it processes annually. It’s testing computer vision tech at one site that scans items and suggests prices — currently requiring staff to display individual items, but eventually aimed at an automated system.

Manually sorting and pricing “is very high stress,” said Brent Deim, Goodwill’s vice president of technology. The tech should help employees work faster, build AI skills, and its language capabilities can open up roles for people with limited English.

The AI-enabled tech should also result in more consistent pricing, prevent undervaluing of items, and ultimately increase proceeds that fund its free education and job training programs.

And those initiatives are another opportunity for integrating AI, said Huan Do, Goodwill’s VP of mission advancement. Do is eager to apply the Changemakers’ AI credential to the programs to “enable our students to be the best employees available for a 21st century workforce.”

Rapid pace of change

Jackson of Project C.U.R.E. has his own ambitious ideas for AI. One is to create videos with avatars that guide healthcare workers in remote communities in repairing broken medical devices themselves — avatars that reflect the people being assisted, speaking their language and dialect.

But he also recognizes the hurdles to making AI initiatives a reality. For his 35-person team — even with 35,000 volunteer supporters — budget and staffing constraints loom large.

So do the challenges of digitizing historic paper records, persuading clinics to enter current operational data, and navigating privacy and data-use concerns. Keeping pace with rapidly evolving technologies, and ensuring those technologies can talk to one another, add further pressure.

“I’m just sitting here thinking, ‘Oh man, we are so far behind already,'” Jackson said after a tech demo at the summit. “We’ll try to get there.”