If Philanthropy Is the Love of Humanity, Where Does AI Fit In?
Last month, I was at TED in Vancouver. AI was everywhere. In every conversation, at many of the breakouts, even at the after parties, we heard the good, the bad, the ugly, and use cases spanning so many different sectors.
Throughout all of it, one thing became clear: this is a powerful tool. And the delta between people who are leveraging AI and those who aren't is growing. There are real fears about its potential, and those fears aren't unfounded. But there's also enormous possibility for it to help us be more effective, more informed, and more efficient in the work we do.
Philanthropy translates from its Greek roots philein (to love) and anthropos (humankind) to love of humanity.
Which left me with a question I keep coming back to: If “philanthropy” literally translates - from its Greek roots philein (to love) and anthropos (humankind) - to love of humanity, how can our sector benefit from the efficiencies and increased knowledge of AI, and where do we preserve the humanity of it?
At JH Philanthropy, we’ve been doing the work of figuring this out - testing tools, integrating them into client engagements where appropriate, and having honest conversations about what’s working and what isn’t. We’re not technologists. But we are practitioners who work at the intersection of complex family dynamics, high-stakes decisions, and real community impact. That vantage point shapes how we see AI’s role in this sector.
The questions underneath the technology are ones worth sitting with, and we think advisors who are asking them now will be better positioned to guide their clients well.
Where We're Seeing Real Value
In our client work, a lot of the AI conversation has started on the efficiency side. How can it help foundation staff be more efficient? How can it help reduce operating costs? Those are real and valid questions, and we've seen some genuinely useful applications.
For financial analysis and grantmaking due diligence, AI has been a helpful first pass. It can review financial statements, flag inconsistencies, and help us organize information ahead of a deeper review. We've used it as an input to our grantmaking diligence process for clients, and it has surfaced questions we might not have caught as quickly on our own.
But here's the important part: it's an input, not a conclusion. When AI flags something in diligence, the next step isn't a decision. It's another review of the materials and/or a conversation with the nonprofit to understand the context. Sometimes the flag is a real concern. Sometimes it's a perfectly reasonable explanation that only makes sense when you hear the story behind the numbers.
For lean foundation operations (and many of our clients operate with small staff or no staff at all), AI can help draft board materials, summarize grantee reports, and organize institutional knowledge. For families giving through a donor advised fund (DAF), the value may come from researching potential grantees or organizing past giving. For families navigating complex gift structures or legal language, it can help make sense of dense material before we all sit down with your attorney. It doesn't replace professional counsel, but it can help you show up with sharper questions.
The real value isn’t just speed. It’s the cognitive lift. When the administrative and analytical work gets easier, you and your team can spend more time on what really matters: relationships, discernment, and decisions that move money to the communities and causes you care most about.
From the Field: A Lesson in Looking Beyond the Application
“We were reviewing proposals for a client's pilot program and received what looked like an exceptionally strong application. It was well-written, clearly aligned with the pilot's goals, and checked every box. We were genuinely excited about it.
Then we did the site visit. And the organization's leadership didn't seem to know much about the focus area of the pilot. The proposal had been beautifully crafted to fit the pilot, but it didn't reflect where the organization was actually headed.
Ultimately, it turned out to be a good thing we caught it. We wouldn't have wanted to fund a pilot and then discover that the goals we were investing in weren't shared by the people doing the work. If we'd relied solely on the written application, we could have made a grant with unrealistic expectations and set everyone up for disappointment.
In the age of AI, we expect to see even stronger applications and reports, carefully curated to say exactly what donors want to hear. That's not a reason to stop reading them. But it makes the in-person work, the calls, the meetings, the site visits, even more critical to make sure what's on paper matches what's happening on the ground, and that the partnership is genuinely mutual.”
- Hannah Kaplan, Philanthropy Advisor, JH Philanthropy
What AI Can't Know
This is where the honest conversation matters, and where I think our sector needs to have its eyes wide open.
AI models are trained on existing text. That means they reflect what’s already been documented, published, and digitized. They don’t know the neighborhood organizer who has been doing the work for 15 years but has never written a white paper. They can’t account for what a community has already tried and why it didn’t work. They don’t understand the political dynamics between local institutions, or the history that shapes how a community responds to outside investment. That’s not a neutral gap. It systematically advantages the well-resourced and well-documented, which is precisely where philanthropy should be paying attention. The information that matters most in community-centered philanthropy is often the information that lives in people, not in documents.
AI also can't read a room. It can't sense the tension between siblings who have fundamentally different visions for a family foundation. It can't hold the grief of a family deciding how to honor someone they've lost. It can't navigate the unspoken dynamics of a board that has been together for twenty years.
Philanthropy, at its core, is about values. And values aren't always stated clearly. They show up in hesitation, in what someone doesn't say, in the way a family lights up when they talk about a particular cause. That kind of listening is irreplaceable and it’s what our team loves to do.
Where Humanity Leads
So where does that leave the work?
For us, it comes back to the things that are irreducibly human. Facilitating the family conversation where the real issue isn't on the agenda. Coaching a trustee to learn more about the communities the foundation serves before making a funding decision. Customizing a diligence process for each client, right-sizing it for the size of the grant, because a $10,000 gift and a $500,000 investment deserve different levels of attention and care. Asking the question behind the question.
Erin Gollhofer Selfridge, who leads our Client Services team, puts it simply: “the bar isn't ‘can AI do this?’ The bar is ‘are we adding value beyond what AI could do?’ If you leverage AI to do the analysis, that's an input. Now dig into the numbers. Be able to explain them. Add your perspective. The tool gets you to the starting line faster, but the real work begins there.”
The presence of good tools doesn't reduce the need for good judgment. It raises the bar for it. When information flows faster and decisions come more easily, the philanthropy advisor who can slow things down, ask the important question, and name what's really happening becomes more valuable, not less. The family member who insists on sitting with a decision rather than rushing it becomes the wisest person in the room.
What won’t change, no matter how fast the technology moves, is the need for real relationships and the willingness to show up. That’s where we’re investing, and where we think the most important work in philanthropy will always happen.
We'd love to hear how your family or foundation is thinking about AI. What's working? What questions are you wrestling with? Reach out and let us know at hello@jhphilanthropy.com.