It’s Tuesday morning and your communications team has just launched a lapsed donor reactivation campaign. They used an AI model to generate hundreds of warm, personalised messages in minutes, and the results are impressive. The tone is right, the subject lines are optimised, and the team are delighted with the time they saved.
Then one of those emails lands in the inbox of a recently bereaved supporter. It thanks her for years of generous giving “as a couple” and asks if she and her husband would consider resuming their support.
Nobody intended that, but nobody had told the AI where the red lines were either. No one flagged bereavement data as off-limits, no one had built an approval step, and no one even thought to ask the question. This has not happened yet, as far as I know, but it will; the conditions for it are already in place across the sector.
The side of fries
AI is arriving like a side of fries in every app and piece of software your team already uses. It is bundled into your CRM, embedded in your email, baked into your design package. AI is showing up without a board paper, without a risk assessment, and without anyone formally deciding where and how to adopt it.
Your team is almost certainly already using AI without oversight, we call this ‘Shadow AI’.
How many charities have a formal strategy for how AI should be used, where the boundaries are, and who is accountable when something goes wrong? Very few. That is not a technology gap, it’s a leadership gap.
The decision is not whether or not to use AI. That ship has sailed. It’s whether you are leading this adoption, or just watching it happen without any governance, guardrails or red lines.
The force multiplier
AI amplifies, multiplies and accelerates everything it touches; good or bad, true or false, helpful or hindering.
Jake O’Gorman highlights in his recent research publication, AI and the Future of Doing Good, that AI will strengthen good systems and weaken fragile ones. It will ‘magnify’ clear leadership and expose its absence.
If your fundraising strategy is sharp, your data is clean, and your team knows who you are trying to reach and why, AI becomes extraordinarily powerful. It can predict which supporters are most likely to give, tailor communications so that every donor feels known, and automate journeys that would usually take hours to do manually. One hospital charity recently used AI-driven predictive targeting on their Christmas appeal and achieved a 6:1 return, up from 2:1, while mailing 50% fewer supporters; response rates more than doubled.
If your ethics are vague, your messaging is inconsistent, or your data is a mess, AI will scale those problems with the same efficiency.
Where to start
It can be tough to know where to start, as AI can feel risky, fast-moving and even overwhelming. All it really requires is a conversation, a simple policy, and a decision about who owns it in your charity.
If you are a trustee or a CEO reading this, there are five questions worth raising this quarter. Is anyone on your team using AI right now, and do you know which tools? Do you have a policy covering what data AI can access and who approves its output? Have you agreed any red lines, particularly around bereavement, health, and financial hardship data? Is there a named person accountable for AI governance? And if something went wrong tomorrow, could you show your donors and regulators what safeguards were in place?
If the answer to most of those is “no” or “not sure,” you are in good company, but you are also exposed. A one-page policy, an approval workflow, and named owners would put you ahead of most of the sector overnight.
In 1843, Ada Lovelace wrote of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine: “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” In other words, the machine only does what humans tell it to do.
Nearly two centuries later, that is still true. AI can process, predict, and generate at extraordinary speed, but it cannot set your values, choose your boundaries, or decide what your charity stands for. AI scales what humans decide … or it should. Not the other way round.
AI is not a strategy. Leadership is.
Note. This is the signature piece that gave Charity AI Partners its brand tagline. Originally written in March 2026 by Darren Richards in a personal capacity while Global Fundraising Director at Mercy Ships. Republished here as the founding article of the practice.
Darren Richards is the founder of Charity AI Partners and the ‘Charity AI Guy’. He is the author of The Plane Parable and host of the Someday Arrival podcast. @CharityAIGuy