AI is accelerating progress in almost every sector. But in the social sector, it’s exposing a gap.
Despite playing a crucial role as the first line of defense for vulnerable communities, nonprofits are at risk of being left behind in the age of AI. Society is asking nonprofits to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century tech. At the same time, they are up against sociopolitical headwinds, loss of funding, and existential battles.
We cannot expect nonprofits to invest in technological innovation unless we come together across sectors to provide them the resources. The engineers and the activists, the policymakers and the philanthropists. If AI is to be a force for good, we need to fund the tech, fund the future, and fund together.
An emerging, creative class of entrepreneurs — AI-powered nonprofits — represent one of the most promising fronts in social impact. While for-profit companies are building AI that’s fundamentally changing daily life and the global economy, AI-powered nonprofits are using the same tech to solve humanity’s most urgent challenges. They’re banding together to transform education. To advance economic empowerment. To change health outcomes. They are demonstrating resilience in ways the private sector alone cannot.
Take CareerVillage. Since 2011, CareerVillage has been on a mission to democratize access to career information and support those who need it most. Rather than shying away from hard questions about how AI will impact the labor market, CareerVillage is leaning in. Their AI-powered “Coach” platform helps job seekers navigate the changing labor market by offering mock interviews, resume support, career navigation, and more. Coach has already delivered personalized guidance to 50,000 learners, the majority of which have been youth from low-income households, students of color, and women.
But that’s just one example. New data from Fast Forward’s 2025 AI for Humanity Report, created with support from Google.org, finds that AI-powered nonprofits like CareerVillage are leading an early-stage transformation of AI in the nonprofit sector. We found that nonprofits are building AI solutions at every size and every stage. 40% of AI-powered nonprofits surveyed have been using AI for a year or less. And nearly a third (30%) have budgets of $500K or less.
It isn’t a surprise that the smallest, nimblest nonprofits are leading the way. Nonprofits have always looked for ways to do more with less. In this way, AI-powered nonprofits are similar to traditional nonprofits — they care about impact and efficiency. But AI-powered nonprofits are organized differently, and they have a different set of needs.
For one, AI-powered nonprofits need tech expertise in their C-suite and on their staff. Tech and data aren’t extraneous. They’re core program costs. It costs money to build the technology responsibly, and it takes time for impact to follow. This puts a lot of AI-powered nonprofits in a catch-22: needing capital to prove impact, but needing proven impact to unlock capital.
To that end, AI-powered nonprofits need support at every stage of the impact cycle: from research and development, to sustaining mid-stage growth — the point where many nonprofits otherwise stall — to scaling proven models.
Importantly, 84% of AI-powered nonprofit respondents said funding would most help them further develop and scale AI. This insight matters because the data shows a clear relationship between resources and reach. At the smallest budgets, AI-powered nonprofits are serving thousands, a median of just under 2,000 lives. By the time budgets cross $1 million, median reach jumps to half a million people. And at more than $5 million, AI-powered nonprofits are reaching millions of people — a median impact of 7 million lives.
To unlock their full potential, they need the support of coalitions, shared infrastructure, and cross-sector collaboration with technologists, policymakers, and funders.
There is no better example of this than Karya. The smartphone-based platform employs workers in rural India to complete AI data tasks to train large language models, like translation for less-commonly spoken languages. Karya seized an opportunity to flip the script on the AI economy — improving global technologies while enabling income and upskilling opportunities for over 100,000 workers.
Karya also licenses its technology to local governments and peer organizations. Using Karya’s Platform-as-a-Service model, Digital Green sourced speech data directly from farmers in Kenya to fine-tune an agricultural AI model. The localized model outperformed leading models on domain-specific tasks, proving that community-generated data can drive smarter, more relevant AI. Karya provided the technology, Digital Green led on-the-ground operations, and philanthropic funding helped bridge the two.
Partnership, even within the nonprofit sector, acts as a force multiplier. AI can unlock positive benefits for humanity, but we all play a role in making sure that happens.
Every once in a while, history presents us with moments that demand a fundamental shift in approach. This is one of those moments.
It starts with giving nonprofits a seat at the table.
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