By: Melissa Bank Stepno, President & CEO
I really didn’t want to write another post about AI.
AI is such a hot topic that it is becoming overplayed in our communication channels, at least in my opinion.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge the incredible impact AI is having (and will continue to have) in every aspect of our lives.
It’s just to say that I’d like a moment to not have to think about it, debate its merits, or defend whether we should or shouldn’t be using it.
A few weeks ago, I wasn’t thinking about AI at all. I was engrossed in a novel set in time when cellphones were just starting to hit the mass-market. You know, that ancient time back around the early 1990s. So long ago that AI, as we currently know it, didn’t exist.
While reading my book (yes, one with actual pages to turn!), I had the TV playing quietly in the background, and I wasn’t paying attention to what was on. That is, until something caught my attention and pulled me away from my book.
On that Sunday evening, 60 Minutes aired a segment on Nvidia, the computer chip company. Part of the story featured an interview with Pinar Demirdag, the co-founder and CEO of Cuebric, a generative AI company serving content creators and that uses Nvidia products. In some ways, none of this matters. It is what Demirdag said that keyed me into the segment:
“Humanity will have the choice to see themselves inferior to machines or superior to machines.”
She went on to say:
“Just because a machine can do faster calculations, comparisons and analytical solution creation that doesn’t make it smarter than you, it simply commutates faster.
In my world, in my belief, smarts have to do with your capacity to love, create, expend, transcend. These are qualities that no machine can ever bear, that are reserved to only humans.”
I was captivated.
So captivated, in fact, that I rewound the segment (something you couldn’t do back in the ’90s) to hear her words again. Now, weeks later, her message is still on my mind, and I’m writing this blog post as a result.
There’s no denying that AI is already affecting the way we work as prospect development professionals. From search engines to wealth screening tools, to social media platforms, and even the word processor I’m using to write this post—AI is embedded in nearly every tool that we rely on.
However, we do have a choice of how actively, or passively, we want to integrate AI into our work. While it’s not realistic to avoid using the tools we rely on that already have AI built in, we do have control over whether we actively choose to use specialized AI services, like generative AI tools that can rewrite text for us. (*for example: I used one of these tools to rewrite this paragraph for me).
At HBG, we’ve noticed an increasing number of our clients including clauses in their contracts asking us not to use AI in the course of our work for them. We view this as an opportunity to educate the client, explaining why we can’t avoid AI entirely. At the same time, we also assure them that we currently do not pursue the use of these tools (like for the purposes of generative AI, as I did in the paragraph above) to assist with the research that we produce for them.
So, what does this mean for our profession as a whole? While we can’t ignore and shouldn’t eliminate AI, we can advocate for our role alongside it. As Prospect Strategy and Fundraising Intelligence professionals, we bring something that AI cannot replicate: the ability to grasp the nuances, ethical considerations, and unique circumstances that shape our research. It’s the human touch. Sure, machines can quickly aggregate data and analyze it at incredible speed, but speed is just one piece of the puzzle.
What truly sets us apart from the machine is our ability to apply context, understand the bigger picture, and make thoughtful decisions based on more than just the data points.
If you want to read more of my musings about AI check out my Intelligent Edge blog post from November 2023, Alternative Interpretations of AI.
