The Value of AI is in the Work That Was Always Worth Doing

There is plenty to question with artificial intelligence. Its net-value in the long run remains uncertain, its environmental and economic costs aren't being taken seriously enough, and some of its most visible uses are purely frivolous. Endless generated content for the sake of novelty, chatbots answering questions nobody needed answered, and a lack of transparent guardrails make AI seem at best like a benign distraction, and at worst, like a threatening disruption to the way we live and work.

However, as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous in our working lives, that integration includes the many organizations dedicated to improving people's lives through social impact work and providing the public goods that communities have always depended on. Nonprofits, chambers of commerce, libraries, local government offices, and small businesses fill the gaps that larger systems leave behind. They feed families when benefits run short, help residents find jobs and services, keep main streets open and flourishing, and help people in need access healthcare. It is unfortunately the nature of mission-driven organizations that their efforts have never been well-resourced, but with the funding environment around mission-driven work shifting so quickly in recent years, the very gaps these organizations exist to close are at risk of growing faster than their ability to address them. Public funding has become less reliable, philanthropic priorities have had to shift to cover those losses, and the systemic result is that social impact organizations on the ground are being asked to do the same work or more of it, with fewer people and less support.

AI provides a clear and immediate value to these organizations. It makes drafting grant applications, preparing reports, summarizing policy changes, and keeping up with the digital upkeep every organization now needs significantly more manageable by small teams with much bigger priorities. When AI takes on a share of that work and staff get time back to focus on their mission, the most impressive contribution of AI presents itself.

Room to Innovate

Anyone who has worked at a small nonprofit knows that sometimes the work is prioritized on a triage-like basis. The “need-to-haves” like keeping programs running, meeting reporting requirements, and serving their existing clients come first. After those are covered, there is usually little left in the bucket for the “nice-to-have” things like launching a new program, experimenting with a better way to reach the communities they serve, or automating a task the whole team dreads. Creating and testing new things takes time and labor, the payoff is uncertain, and the effort competes with work that can't wait, so usually new and exciting ideas stay hypothetical.

This is where the true value of AI is, because it is absolutely capable of making nice-to-haves a reality. The people who know a community best, and who know how to actually achieve their mission, have rarely been the ones who could build digital tools for it. Hiring a developer meant paying someone who didn't know the work, often at a cost that made the project not worth even pursuing. Now the person with the knowledge can build tools that work better because they know exactly what it needs to look like. When staff without a technical background can turn their hard-won expertise into dashboards, automated reporting tools, or engines that curate the news and policy updates they need, and when research and drafting take hours instead of weeks, automating lots of small, value-adding systems suddenly becomes worth the time and budget.

Affordable experimentation is the dream of any mission-driven organization. An organization can test an idea at a small scale, see whether it works, and decide based on evidence whether it's worth pursuing. Even though the time AI frees up never stays empty for long, the team has more capacity for those “big brain” issues, and the impact of their work keeps growing.

Outside the Echo Chamber

Working at an organization built around AI, I can sometimes get lost in the echo chamber, going back and forth about model releases, tool comparisons, and technical applications that feel far removed from anyone's daily life. What pulls me out of it and reminds me of the good this work can do is hearing from the people using AI tools to improve the work they do for their communities, usually in one of two different settings:

The first is in the conversations I have with the nonprofits, small businesses, and community leaders we work with once we start talking about “the art of the possible.” Someone describes an idea they have been holding on to for a long time, or a problem piling onto an already significant workload, that got them wondering how AI could help. They learn what kind of effort it would take with AI handling part of the load, and suddenly ideas start to look achievable, and problems start to look solvable. The excitement in some of those moments is genuinely palpable.

The second setting I've found inspiration in comes from the other side of that same moment, when I get to hear staff at these amazing organizations share the positive impact AI has had on pursuing their mission. I've heard from a program director who turned an eight-hour weekly task into the push of a button, an organization using drone networks to monitor forest fires in real time, and a grant writer using our assistant tool to discover and apply for new funding opportunities. Their stories follow the same arc as the conversations I've been a part of with our clients, but told from the other side of having discovered what is possible with AI. The pride in how they talk about what they've done is hard to miss, and the questions they field usually come from a curiosity about how others can do something similar.

The people in these roles chose their work because they care about having an impact in their communities, and they still want to do the same work they always have. What changes is how much of that work they can take on, and which shelved ideas might finally be realized.

Shaping the Future of AI

Much of the public conversation about AI focuses on its largest and most speculative promises, or on its least serious uses. The clearest value is in organizations that have always done necessary work with too few hands and now have the ability to do more of it and weather challenges to achieve their goals. Those same organizations and communities regrettably have the least say in how AI develops though. They are rarely the customers and use cases that developers have in mind, rarely the voices in policy debates, and never the priority behind investment decisions made at the top. The social impact space deserves far more of that attention, in how AI tools are built, how they are funded, and how people are trained to use them.

The future of AI depends heavily on who is using it today, and how they are using it. When libraries, food banks, local governments, and small businesses use AI to better serve their communities, they prove its potential for public good. They demonstrate the kind of AI systems that are truly worth building, and that the future of AI should be shaped by organizations doing the work that will always be worth doing.