Are You AI Ready? A Practical Checklist for Nonprofits

By Denise Carbone
It’s easy to feel behind when it comes to AI, don’t worry, we hear this often from nonprofits and foundations.

You might be hearing terms like ‘use an agent for that!’, Agentforce, large language models, or generative AI and wondering what it all means for your organization now and in the future? Maybe you’ve even been asked by your board or leadership team, “What’s our AI strategy?”

You don’t need to panic. You just need to prepare.

In my work with nonprofits, I’ve found that most teams aren’t as far off as they think. The key is to stop thinking of AI as a huge, abstract project and start thinking of it as another tool in your digital toolkit. One that, like all tools, works best when you have a strong foundation.

So how do you know if your organization is ready for AI? Here’s a simple checklist to help you get started.

1. Do You Know Your Use Cases?

Before you do anything else, ask yourself:
What problems are we trying to solve?
Where are we spending too much time?
What’s repetitive, manual, or slowing us down?
If I were magically given 10 more people to work with us, where would we place them?

You don’t need to “do AI” across your entire organization. You just need to find one use case that would genuinely make your team’s life easier. That could be grant review, onboarding volunteers, pulling reports for funders, or managing program data.

Start there. Start real.

2. Is Your Data Clean, Structured, and Useful?

Like all good things from reports to dashboards, Agentforce and other AI tools rely on data. If the data is messy, inconsistent, or scattered across systems, your results won’t be helpful.

Here are a few data hygiene questions to consider:

• Do we have duplicate records?
  
  

• Are our most-used fields filled in consistently?
  
  

• Do we know who owns what data?
  
  

• Is the data organized in a way that’s easy to access and report on?

You don’t need perfect data. You just need the right data, in the right place, for the use case you’ve chosen.

3. Do You Have Governance in Place?

This is one of the most overlooked pieces of AI readiness. If you don’t have clarity around who owns your data, who can make changes, or how your system evolves, you’re likely to run into confusion.

AI adds another layer of complexity. That makes it even more important to have:

• Clear roles and responsibilities
  

• A process for reviewing and approving changes
  

• A strategy for keeping your system clean and intentional over time
  

Think of governance as the structure that protects your people, your data, and your outcomes.

4. Are You Open to Experimenting?

AI doesn’t require perfection. It requires curiosity, clarity, and a willingness to try.

The most successful teams I’ve worked with didn’t start with a fully baked AI strategy. They started by testing something small. They asked questions. They gave feedback. They let the tool grow with them.

Being AI-ready isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being prepared, focused, and willing to learn.

You don’t need to be an expert to start. 

You don’t need to be a tech expert to lead on AI in your organization. You just need to know where your time is going, how your data is working, and who’s responsible for what.

Asking yourself what you want to solve faster, what you wish you didn’t have to do manually or at all, and look at the way you’d use more team members if you had them. 

Start with one use case. Make sure the data behind it is solid. Build a culture of ownership and experimentation. From there, you’ll be ready to explore what tools like Agentforce can really do for your team.

Need help reviewing your data, governance, or use cases?
We’re here to support you. Let’s walk through it together and create a clear, confident path forward. Reach out to us!