Pivoting to the AI Era: What’s Next for Digital Strategy?

Generative AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it's a present-day reality rapidly reshaping how organizations operate, engage, and deliver on their missions.

In a guest expert session in the June 2025 Applied AI (XD131) with our partners at Forum One, Elisabeth Bradley, CEO, and Brian Graves, the Vice President of Engineering, shared insights on the strategic adoption of AI for mission-driven entities.

Slide from XD131 presentation by Forum One: Technology waves from 1990s to present

AI: A Fundamental Technology Wave, Not Just a Trend

AI is a significant technology wave that will fundamentally alter technical solutions, audience engagement, and organizational operations, rather than just a passing trend. This transformation is driven by five converging forces:

1. Changing audience expectations: Users now anticipate real-time, personalized, and always-on engagement, mirroring experiences with commercial platforms like Amazon and Google.

2. Risk of falling behind or being disrupted is growing: Organizations relying on static digital content risk becoming irrelevant as conversational interfaces and smart automation redefine user interaction.

3. Capacity is constrained: AI offers a powerful solution to automate repetitive, manual tasks, thereby freeing up staff for more strategic, creative, and higher-impact work.

4. Hard things are easier with AI: AI accelerates complex tasks like user research, data science, content strategy, and software development, condensing processes that once took weeks into minutes or hours.

5. AI is rapidly mainstreaming: AI adoption is skyrocketing, with 72% of organizations integrating AI in 2024, and notably, nonprofits are even outpacing some B2C brands in certain areas of AI adoption.

Success in this new era will come not from adopting the "flashiest tools," but from a proactive approach grounded in a clear mission and strategic plan.

Strategic Implementation: Outcomes Over Technology

AI should not be an end in itself, but an integrated enabler within a larger digital strategy, serving existing organizational outcomes, budgets, and accountability structures. The core idea is that while missions and key objectives remain constant, AI can help achieve them faster, cheaper, better, or differently.

The strategic deployment of AI should focus on core organizational levers like programs and digital products, identifying areas of "friction" where AI's four core functions—prediction, classification, automation, or generation—could provide solutions. This means asking: "What is harder than it needs to be, and could AI help?".

Slide from XD131 presentation by Forum One: AI Strategy Is Mission Strategy

Guiding Principles for AI Adoption

Forum One outlined four key principles for thoughtful and responsible AI integration within mission-driven teams:

1. Collaboration: Use AI to extend teams, not replace humans, making staff more effective and allowing them to focus on strategic work.

2. Purpose: Ensure AI technology is built to deliver impact and is deeply aligned with the organization's mission.

3. Adaptability: Embrace a mindset of testing, learning, and iteration due to AI's rapid evolution, encouraging organizations to move quickly without needing everything figured out upfront.

4. Ethics: Prioritize trust and ensure AI tools uphold organizational values, recognizing the higher responsibility of mission-driven practitioners to not just avoid working against their missions, but to actively advance them.

Beyond these principles, organizations must engage in robust conversations about ethical implications, privacy, data sensitivity, and internal comfort levels with AI.

Slide from XD131 presentation by Forum One: AI Challenges and Solutions

Key Areas for Successful AI Implementation

There are five highlighted areas where organizations are successfully deploying AI through small pilots and valuable use cases:

1. Unlocking Internal Efficiencies: Augmenting teams by automating repetitive tasks. Exchange Design supported the Surdna Foundation in building a Slack-integrated AI chatbot for staff to quickly access grant-making policies, reducing a significant internal pain point and laying the groundwork for broader applications like grant data summarization and compliance automation.

2. Building Strategic Foresight: Utilizing AI for business insights, sentiment analysis, and predictive analytics. GiveDirectly used AI (integrating satellite imagery, wind speed models, and historical damage data) to predict which communities in Puerto Rico would be hardest hit by Hurricane Fiona, allowing them to proactively distribute cash relief within days.

3. Delivering More Value to Audiences: Creating personalized content, improved recommendations, and enhanced accessibility. Forum One and Exchange Design are supporting AARP in exploring AI to personalize their livability index, creating dynamic insights based on user location and interests, and inferring scores for areas with missing data.

4. Rapidly Testing and Validating Ideas: Accelerating prototyping and feedback loops. For example: The Minneapolis Institute of Art used AI prototyping tools during a design sprint to rapidly build and test interactive prototypes for engaging high school students with a modern art exhibit, collapsing weeks of work into hours or days.

5. Expanding Reach and Inclusion: Leveraging multilingual capabilities and meeting users on AI-powered platforms. A SNAP benefits team's pilot chatbot unexpectedly assisted a user in Haitian Creole, despite not being explicitly trained for it, demonstrating a major accessibility leap for reaching multilingual and underserved communities.

The Evolution Beyond Chatbots: The Rise of AI Agents

There is declining interest in building chatbots for their own sake, though they were a necessary starting point for proof-of-concept, they are difficult to build effectively. He envisions a future where chatbots become a "background technology".The "next level" of AI development involves the integration of agents. 

As the event concluded, Elisabeth Bradley and Brian Graves expressed gratitude for the diverse perspectives shared, underscoring the value of understanding the broader trajectory of these digital and AI-driven changes for brands, firms, and individual careers.

This series features insights from our June 2025 Applied AI (XD131) course. Listen to the AI-generated podcast for an audio recap of this event.