CNI - AI for Grantmakers

Artificial Intelligence - AI for Grantmakers

Why Grantmakers Should Use Computers and the Internet

AI 101 for Grantmakers

Welcome to the Future of Business Efficiency, Delivered Today

In today's world, speed, efficiency, and accuracy are the golden trio of success. As a forward-thinking business, you seek the most effective solutions that cut the time-consuming quests for answers, sharpen decision-making, and boost productivity. AI can perform not just business tasks, but also business processes.

Your Business Expert at Your Fingertips

AI offers instant access to your institution's knowledge base and internet data. It's like having an all-knowing expert always at your disposal, a master librarian who knows every word of every document you've ever produced or collected. Your AI can provide detailed policy information, and comprehensive product data, and answer any query drawn from your company's vast digital resources in real-time. No more hours wasted searching through files or documents. Your answer is always a question away.

Employees Leave, Knowledge Stays

As we experience The Great Retirement of baby boomers, much of the critical knowledge and experience held by these seasoned professionals risks being lost. But with AI, that knowledge and experience can be preserved. With your organization's AI 'Institutional Memory,' your business memory stays intact, safeguarding your institutional processes and wisdom from employee departures, retirements, or extended leaves.

A Conversation with Your Data

The power of our AI goes beyond mere retrieval; it can hold intelligent, meaningful conversations about your data. It can explain, elaborate, and discuss information in a context that makes sense for your specific needs. Think of it as having a dialogue with your own database, extracting insights, and understanding your business better than ever before.

| Describe your interest in AI related to financial grants |

- Just gathering information

See the Additional AI Resources below

- Interested but am totally dependent on my grant management software vendor

Ask your software vendor about their plans to use AI. As long as your software vendor is exploring AI use then this is the ideal situation because you don't have to do anything to reap the benefits. Let your vendor know the areas of your workflow that could benefit from AI analysis. These will generally be the areas that are time/reviewers dependent.

- Interested and have IT staff to create solutions

I'll be happy to give you up to an hour of free phone/Zoom conversation to discuss your needs. Once I understand that then I can better direct you to the appropriate resources. Contact me and I'll put your team on the path. There are excellent free and paid AI tools to create in-house solutions. Python is the most common programming language for AI applications and Hugging Face is the best free all-in-one AI application development site.

- Interested in using free AI tools to experiment with AI grant comprehension skills

You can test an AI's ability to comprehend and analyze text with free consumer AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, Claude, etc. If you can use word processing and are comfortable uploading or copying and pasting files then you're ready to use any of these Conversational AIs. Upload a section from a grant application and ask the AI questions about it. Upload an entire application and have the AI prepare various levels of summaries. You'll be using general-purpose AI tools but it is easy and cheap to train custom versions for grant application analysis to get the best results for real-world use.

- Would like more information based on my specific needs

I'll be happy to give you up to an hour of free phone/Zoom conversation to discuss your needs. Once I understand your interest then I can better direct you to the appropriate resources. Whenever possible, which will be the usual case, those will be free AI tools. There will also be paid AI tools and which ones to choose will be based on your specific needs. My general customer philosophy is to put as much control and access in your hands as you want to accept. I don't directly sell any of these AI tools so I'm not biased by a need to market a particular product. In general, I sell AI consulting services from strategy to tactics. When it comes to grantseekers and grantmakers however, I'm more interested in spreading the word on this highly disruptive technology that is upon us than growing a customer list, which is why I offer the free phone/Zoom conversation. It may be all that you need.

Food for Thought

Will AI make our current grant application processes more efficient? Absolutely. But will it do more than that? Will it revamp and overhaul those processes with a new paradigm?

How Can I Stay Up-To-Date with AI?

You can't, if we're talking about AI in general. AI isn't traveling some path of steps. AI is like a drop of water onto a still pond. Its effect radiates quickly in all directions. That is because AI, which has many facets, can be thought of as a programming language. Most programming languages aren't tied to one application or mission, but are found system-wide in all kinds of enterprises. This programming language is available to all programmers. Advances will be made at the speed of the individual, not dependent on the corporate giant, so growth is exponential rather than linear. You can't keep up with AI overall because it is everywhere. If you narrow your focus then you can at least keep abreast of the topic without devoting all your time to it.

Everyone and their brother is writing about AI so how do you even start? Since we're concerned with the financial grant world, I'm going to suggest you follow Phillip Deng, the founder/CEO of Grantable. Other than getting a couple of bucks if you subscribe to Grantable through a button on my site (completely unnecessary), I'm not connected with him or his company. I'm also not endorsing him as THE guy to follow on AI grant topics but he does have a lot of grant-related AI content in a variety of formats. Check out the Grantable website, or his The Process blog on substack, or his Facebook page.

For additional information on AI topics, try starting with one of the Conversational AIs like Bing, Bard, or Claude. Ask it to help you find information on your subject of interest. AI is changing daily and information in stories on AI topics may become outdated overnight. Learning to use the Conversational AIs as a starting point for education on topics of interest offers an easy, flexible way to pursue a topic at whatever depth you desire.

Additional AI Resources