Why your organisation needs an AI assistant

Charities are adopting artificial intelligence (AI). More than three quarters (76%) use the tech, according to the Charity Digital Skills Report. But very few of them use it effectively. Only 2% claimed to use AI at a strategic level and more than half (51%) said they were simply exploring and testing. 

As a sector, we seem to understand the promise of AI but few people put that promise into practice. It still feels like a lot of prompts thrown into ChatGPT and Copilot, with a lot of risk and little direction, and very few people taking advantage of automation.  

So we thought we’d highlight a genuinely brilliant use case for AI, one that charities of all shapes and sizes can onboard. Giant AI provides an internal source of truth, unifying all data sources, combining them with internal documentation, and providing your team with the right answers at the click of a button. The AI assistant, as demonstrated by Giant Digital, remains an ethical and effective use of AI and, as we’ll show, the benefits are massive.

How does an AI assistant work 

To start, let’s look at how the tech works. As with most AI tools, AI assistants largely depend on data – and charities famously have a lot of data. But that data is typically fragmented, spread across various platforms. You’ll likely have data on your customer relationship management (CRM) system, content management system (CMS), a myriad of social media platforms, volunteer management systems, project management systems, website analytics platforms, email and marketing platforms, fundraising and payment systems, event platforms, and so on, so forth.  

Then you’ll have your documentation, often hidden in a million hard-to-reach places, maybe some in SharePoint or Google Drive or OneDrive, others found on your Intranet, others on the Intranet that never quite made it, others in HR platforms or on collaboration tools, and so on. And, to add salt into the wound, different teams and departments – and individuals in teams and departments – typically hoard their own data, failing to share it with the wider org.  

So you likely have so much data that is invisible to most people in the organisation. And that data could prove transformative for your charity, particularly in the AI world.  

That’s where Giant AI comes in. The tool unifies all of your data. In the case of Giant AI, the assistant integrates your systems, from Salesforce to Donorfy to Beacon, and brings everything together for a single source of truth. Ask the assistant a question and you’ll get an answer, based on your unified data, married with your policies, your values, and your mission. It’s hard to emphasise how powerful that could be, if employed purposeful and effectively.  

New models of document handling and knowledge sharing  

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the AI assistant is knowledge sharing. Consider the last time you could not find a document, or a template, or the part of a contract that you absolutely needed at that precise time (clause 13.6.3, for example), and spent hours trying to locate the files. It is frustrating. It is time-consuming. It is all-too-frequent, especially in a sector that struggles to invest in streamlining tech. Sometimes we never find the information. Sometimes we create new documents to replace the lost documents, then find the original document moments later.  

An AI assistant eliminates that frustration, across the org. Every employee and volunteer can type in a prompt and the assistant will provide the right information. New starters can receive instant answers for their many questions in a matter of seconds. Volunteers suddenly have all the right tools at their fingertips. Consider the benefit to service delivery teams, the people on the frontline. They could ask the AI for reassurance, based on carefully constructed and regularly updated policies and procedures, and ensure they’re providing the right care to service users.  

The AI assistant will know your handbook better than your HR department. It’ll know your policies more than your trustees or your CEO. It’ll be able to extract precise information from any prescribed context, from any given document at any given time. It’ll allow teams to share information with other teams automatically, increasing visibility across the organisation.  

Think of the results: fewer urgent instant messages, less context switching, a reduction of meetings, operational streamlining, and so on. The AI assistant is a simple form of automation, one that frees up time for you to get on with the stuff that matters: serving communities.  

Intelligent analysis in the click of a button 

AI has enormous potential in terms of data analysis and decision-making. But AI outputs are limited when dealing with limited information. That’s why data unification is so important. By providing all of your data, from multiple sources, you’ve armed your AI assistant to offer holistic advice that considers every part of your organisation. That’s incredibly powerful.  

Giant AI can offer you advice on email marketing, taking into account social media performance. It could suggest the best investment of time and energy, perhaps even the areas in which you could bring in volunteers. It can tell you of content opportunities based on information found in your CRM. Maybe you’ve got loads of service users from a particular part of the UK, all particularly active on your site at one particular time. The AI assistant marries the two data sources and provides insight into what’s happening, helping you refine your approach. 

The use cases are endless. And they do not need to be specific. As Giant Digital stress, Giant AI is brilliant for opportunity identification. You can bring the AI into ideation sessions or leadership meetings, and bounce fundraising ideas or service solutions off the assistant. The AI will take the idea and analyse it against your unified data, against your finances, and against your values, and ultimately provide an analysis of feasibility, potential success, and so on.  

Giant AI is a source of universal organisational knowledge. It will consolidate all of your data and drastically improve the decisions you make. It will save every member of your charity, from the first-time volunteer to the CEO, resources and effort. It’ll reduce frustration. And it’ll save you time, so that you can prioritise the people who matter most: your service users.