How Nonprofit Professionals Can Begin to AI-Proof Their Careers

By Heather Mansfield, founder and editor-in-chief of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently made the controversial claim that in the very near future, AI may wipe out millions of white-collar jobs and lead to 10-20% unemployment in the United States. The prediction is that AI chatbots will replace many customer service jobs, such as call center representatives and cashiers, and that AI agents will replace and automate entry-level human labor, such as data entry and administrative work.

Add to that the robots that are projected to arrive by 2030 to start replacing transportation, health care, and factory workers, and you begin to understand why venture capitalists are investing record-high amounts of cash into AI companies and start-ups: replacing 10-20% of the workforce is very cost-effective for Big Business and Big Tech. AI evangelists claim that this transition to full automation of the economy will lead to economic growth, but acknowledge that in the process, tens of millions of jobs will be eliminated.

Understanding what’s coming and accepting how quickly our work life is going to change makes it clear that future-proofing your career is time-sensitive. The era of embracing AI for self-preservation has arrived, and for nonprofit marketers and fundraisers, the sooner you commit to understanding and using AI in your work, the less likely you will be replaced by it.

1) Become AI literate.

The rule of 100 states that if you spend 100 hours, or 18 minutes a day, on a discipline for a year, you’ll be better than 95% of the world’s population in that discipline. Thus, here are five simple ways to begin your education in AI literacy:

Learn the terminology and key concepts of AI and how it is being integrated into nonprofit marketing and fundraising tools. For example, Generative AI (ChatGPT), Predictive AI (GoFundMe Intelligence), Agentic AI (Dataro ), and Artificial General Intelligence (Version2).
Sign up for a paid chatbot and use it every day in your work. New research has revealed that over-reliance on chatbots, such as ChatGPT, can significantly erode our critical thinking skills, so you can limit your use of chatbots, but having a working knowledge of how to use them for marketing and fundraising is an essential skill for today’s nonprofit marketers and fundraisers.
Listen to podcasts about AI in the nonprofit sector.
Sign up for demos to learn how AI marketing and fundraising software works – even if your nonprofit can not afford the software.
Pick five AI marketing and fundraising tools and experiment.

2) Excel at being human.

A backlash is growing in response to the proliferation of AI slop and AI-generated misinformation and disinformation being spread online. In the very near future, it’s likely that your supporters and donors will place high value on human-created content. AI has its benefits for nonprofit marketers and fundraisers, but now is also a time to place more focus on the skills that our social media feeds have distracted us from for the last two decades:

Develop your creative skills, such as writing, photography, and graphic design.
Read and discuss literature, poetry, and philosophy. Play music and make art.
Become a public speaker and/or webinar presenter.
Study and develop your leadership skills.
Develop your in-person skills, such as asking questions, listening, presenting a positive attitude, and the lost pastime of people-watching.

The Futur e of Jobs Report 2025 names AI and technology skills as the top three fastest-growing skills by 2030, but interestingly, the remaining top skills are uniquely human.

3) Become an advocate for the ethical use of AI.

Big Tech companies are in a mad rush to be the first to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Meta are in extreme competition with each other, as well as with tech companies in other countries (especially China), and venture capital investment in the quest to achieve AGI is unprecedented.

Currently, there are no federal laws in the United States regulating AI. Without oversight, large language models (LLMs) continue to scrape the internet with wild abandon. The concern over gender and racial bias in training data is largely ignored, and the environmental impact of data centers is unsustainable. Four point four percent of America’s energy is being used to power data centers (1.3% globally), but that is expected to rise to 6.7% to 12% by 2028 despite the fact that the cost of electricity to U.S. households is already surpassing inflation. Furthermore, AI technology will exacerbate water shortages because it is needed to help cool data centers, yet, data centers are continuing to be built in deserts across the world.

Environmental nonprofits, labor organizations, civil and human rights advocates, and humanities organizations need to launch advocacy campaigns to educate the public about the pros and cons of AI ASAP. On a smaller scale, every nonprofit professional should have a clear understanding of the implications of the rapid deployment of AI in the nonprofit workplace. If nonprofit professionals do not take the lead in advocating for the ethical use of AI, then who will? Becoming an informed advocate is good for society and the planet, and as the Future of Jobs Report 2025 revealed, it’s also an emerging career.

The 2026 Certificate in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Marketing & Fundraising program provides an honest, balanced approach to using AI for nonprofit marketing and fundraising—and illuminates why AI literacy is a must-have skill for 2026 and onward. Customized for nonprofit professionals, this webinar series will expand your skill set, advance your career, and help transition your nonprofit into the age of AI.