Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (GenAI), is rapidly transforming the world of work.  We’re excited about what it can do, and how it can help us do more to help our nonprofit clients thrive.  We’re also realistic about the risks AI poses, the ethical questions it presents, and the many other challenges involved in using AI responsibly. Click here to watch our recent webinar, “How to Get Along with an Artificial Coworker”, where we share some of what we’ve learned about topics such as: 

AI Technology 

From traditional AI and robotic process automation tools that follow rules written by people to large language models (LLMs) that write their own rules, each AI tool has specific strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the differences between these technologies is key to using them effectively and responsibly – especially in increasingly common scenarios in which many kinds of AI tools are packaged together as seemingly unified apps or services. 

Responsible AI Use: 

LLMs are powerful, flexible, and, arguably, creative. But that also makes them fallible and unpredictable. They work best when paired together with human judgment and oversight. That presumption of oversight marks a newly collaborative, conversational, back-and-forth way of using technology. We say in the webinar that “mindfulness is the new tech”, and that includes proactively addressing urgencies such as: 

  • GenAI’s potential to reinforce and exaggerate historical human biases 
  • The environmental impact of training and running LLMs 
  • Data privacy and security hazards related to AI tools 
  • Intellectual property, licensing, and copyright issues around AI-generated content 

Effective AI Prompting: 

We use that same concept of mindfulness in our discussion of best practices for prompting chat-based AI tools. Our “Checklist for Mindful Prompting” is available to download along with our webinar here, and the webinar walks through the ideas that informed it. We cover the basics and some advanced techniques, but the most essential items on the checklist are:  

  • Task: What you want to do 
  • Role: Whom you want to do it 
  • Context: What they need to know to do it successfully 
  • Audience: For whom it’s being done 

Case Studies: 

Turning from abstract ideas to practical examples, we also walk through two specific cases in which we’re using AI to do more than we could have done without it, including financial analysis and qualitative research.  

Key Takeaway: 

If there’s one idea we stress above the rest, it’s this: put people first to keep people first. We do this by asking not what AI can do for us, but what we can do with AI. By collaborating effectively and responsibly with AI tools, organizations can unlock new possibilities and stay true to their missions in an evolving nonprofit environment. 

Click here to watch the webinar and access our mindful prompting checklist, or here to contact YPTC for assistance.