As AI changes how work gets done, the judgment, trust and partnership nonprofits need matter more than ever.
By Cat Ward, Taproot CEO
Not long after I became CEO of Taproot, a trusted advisor asked me a blunt question: Will pro bono even be needed in the future? What role do humans play if AI can do it all? Nonprofits will build agents to do the work, they said. Maybe Taproot should get into the business of building capacity-building agents itself.
It was destabilizing. Pro bono service, where skilled professionals donate their expertise in areas like strategy, marketing, finance, technology and HR to help nonprofits advance their missions and drive lasting change, has been the work of Taproot, a national nonprofit, for 25 years. If AI could do that, what were we for? The conversation pushed me and our team to get curious, test our assumptions and work out exactly where we stand. I have never been clearer about our answer.
The short answer: AI won’t replace pro bono. It raises the stakes for it
AI will make the parts of pro bono that matter most impossible to ignore.
AI can draft a strategic plan in minutes. It can’t get a divided board to commit to one. It can write a data privacy policy. It can’t sit with a health center’s leadership and decide which patient information should never go near a tool. It can build a donor workflow. It can’t make sure the one-person development team can run it after the pro bono consultant leaves. It can draft the memo announcing a restructure. It can’t be in the room when staff learn their jobs are changing.
We are entering the messy middle of a transition that will likely take the next 20 years. Old ways of working are fading faster than new ones settle in, and that can be disorienting for organizations and the people inside them. Pro bono service is one of the few tools built to help both through it.
The tools are here, the hard part is human
Nonprofits are not short on curiosity. In Taproot’s 2026 Nonprofit Pulse Survey, 37% described their approach to AI as proactive, up from 29% a year earlier. But only about one in three say they have the resources to adapt, and 82% want pro bono support in the year ahead.
A nonprofit can sign up for an AI tool in an afternoon. What it can’t do in an afternoon is the work that decides whether the tool helps or harms: planning for the change, leading people through it, explaining it to staff, boards and communities, and putting governance in place that protects the people it serves.
That has always been where pro bono service created the most value. The deliverable, whether a marketing plan or a financial model, was never the most valuable part. The value was in the thinking behind it and the relationship that let a nonprofit leader and a skilled professional work through a hard problem together.
AI is taking on more of the deliverable. It is not taking on the thinking or the relationship.
That raises the bar on quality. When anyone can produce expert-looking work in seconds, what separates real help from noise is everything around it: scoping the right problem, matching the right expertise, and having a person accountable for the result. Technology can’t be accountable. People can, and we’ll keep it that way.
This is an equity fight
Large, well-resourced nonprofits will figure out AI. They can hire the talent to plan, implement and govern it, and they can afford to get it wrong. Small and mid-sized nonprofits rarely get that room. They get similar tools without the support around them. Without intervention, AI will follow the pattern of every technology wave before it: the organizations with the most capacity pull ahead, and those closest to communities fall behind.
We won’t accept that. Taproot’s door is open to nonprofits of every size, and we have a long history of serving small and mid-sized organizations. We are also deeply committed to serving nonprofits at every level of AI readiness, including those that decide AI isn’t right for them yet.
The talent side of the equation
I don’t believe AI will make human work go away. I do believe it is changing knowledge work in major ways, and the messy middle will ask as much of workers as of organizations.
Pro bono service gives them something rare: work on real issues with real consequences, and the confidence that comes from figuring it out. When roles are shifting under people’s feet, that confidence may be the most important skill a worker can have.
For companies, that makes pro bono service talent development on real problems, building the judgment the AI era makes more valuable, especially when programs are designed to grow it. Our recent report, Human Skills at Work, developed with support from PwC, demonstrated the power of pro bono as a builder of critical skills in the AI era. And for early-career professionals, whose traditional apprenticeship tasks AI now absorbs, it offers real experience with real accountability. For society, it is workforce infrastructure hiding in plain sight: every engagement builds a stronger nonprofit and a more confident, adaptable professional.
We intend to lead this change, not react to it.
Building the next generation of pro bono service
Taproot founded the modern pro bono movement 25 years ago, and we’re committed to building its next generation. Much of that is steady progress across everything we offer: sharper scoping, better matching and clearer quality signals on Taproot Plus. Our Innovation Studio is where we go further, testing new models where no one has drawn a map yet.
AI is one of those frontiers, and the work is already underway. With Okta, we launched Human in the Loop. Pro bono consultants work alongside nonprofits to decide what AI should and shouldn’t do and how to govern it, building their own AI fluency along the way. In the Changemaker Fellowship, run by Caribou with Microsoft Elevate and EY, Taproot leads the AI implementation coaching. And on Taproot Plus, AI Readiness templates turn the most common AI questions into well-scoped projects any nonprofit can request.
Our corporate partners are seeing it too. In our work with Amazon, a team reviewing donor data with Northern Virginia Food Rescue left behind a simple AI workflow for social content and donor recruitment that staff can now run on their own; while at Feeding America the disaster services team got help with grants and project tracking, giving executive leaders visibility and accountability. At a large financial service company, employee teams took on technology and AI projects with nonprofits, with 88% of participating nonprofits expected to be putting the work into practice within three months. As one partner organization put it, the recommendations for “automation and AI-enabled efficiencies… will reduce manual data entry and free up staff capacity for more strategic work.
We’re on this journey too
As a nonprofit ourselves, we’re not asking other nonprofits to do anything we aren’t doing. We are still in the middle of it. A pro bono consultant helped us put AI at the center of our strategy. Our leadership team spent a couple of days offsite working through what this moment means for Taproot. We formed an AI working group and wrote our point of view down before scaling any tools.
It hasn’t always been tidy. Our team has asked tough and important questions. We’ve taken ethics and data privacy seriously, built safety into every step, charged ahead in places and doubled back in others. That’s what nonprofits are facing, and it’s why we can sit beside them credibly.
What we believe
Taproot’s vision is a future where every nonprofit can be as bold and impactful as its mission demands. AI is the newest test of that vision.
Meeting it will take pragmatic optimism: the audacity to imagine what this moment makes possible, and the discipline to do the unglamorous work of getting there. It will also take a willingness to experiment, take smart risks and stay a little playful when things get hard, because no one has a map for the messy middle. We’ll learn our way forward, and we’ll share what we learn.
I’m optimistic, not about AI on its own, but about what happens when it is paired with skilled people invested in a nonprofit’s success. If you’re a leading company with talent to share, or a philanthropy that wants nonprofits at the front of this shift, not the back, let’s build it together.
