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How to Use AI Tools Safely at Nonprofits with Matthew Eshleman pt 2

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 19

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If you have wondered about the real difference between using a free tool like ChatGPT and an enterprise-level solution like Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini, this episode will provide much-needed clarity. While the potential for efficiency is high, many nonprofit leaders are rightfully concerned about data security and how to ensure they are using these models safely.

In part one from their recent webinar, Community IT Outreach Director Carolyn Woodard is joined by Chief Technology Officer Matt Eshleman to demystify the current AI tool landscape, particularly for data security. 

In part two, Matt and Carolyn go over ways to tell you are logged in to your official account or not, the importance of continuous and iterative staff education, and how (and why) to get started creating AI policies to share with staff. 

They were only able to answer a few questions from registration and the audience during this webinar; you can find more questions answered on our reddit community page: https://www.reddit.com/r/NonprofitITManagement/ or in the transcript on our website here: https://communityit.com/webinar-how-to-use-ai-tools-safely-at-nonprofits/

Whether you are already using AI daily or are just beginning to explore its possibilities, this discussion offers a professional and grounded look at how to navigate these tools securely.

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Speaker 1

Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two. You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Carolyn Woodard

Welcome everyone to the Community IT webinar of how to use AI tools safely at nonprofits. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the outreach director for Community IT. I'm going to be the moderator today.

Matthew Eshleman

My name is Matthew Eshelman, and I'm the Chief Technology Officer.

Matthew Eshleman

I appreciate the questions kind of coming in because and I think you know the fact is, right, your staff are already using generative AI tools, and we'll kind of see an example uh you know that next. Um and and also your staff are already interacting with others um generative AI tools. You know, the the you know rush to adopt and incorporate these tools is is pretty rampant. And so uh, you know, I think that's another dimension of this you know new world that we're um interacting with is kind of what how do we expect to operate ourselves and how do we want to interact with others. So

Matthew Eshleman

the word cloud that um Carolyn just put up here um, you know, is the example of the AI tools used at a 50-person nonprofit organization. Um, right, there's 121 of them on here. So if you want to start counting, you'll you'll get 121 um AI tools. Some of these, right, are tools that individuals at the organization are reaching out to and using, and then others, right, are maybe part of other services that uh you know the the end users themselves are are interacting with, right? Like I said, if you're doing any sort of chat um agent, right, it's likely uh driven by AI.

Matthew Eshleman

You know, I went to um schedule um service for my boiler, right, which had some heating problems uh here. And I talked to a very helpful uh AI agent that scheduled the whole appointment, and it was pretty good. Um, right. And so these tools are everywhere for you know nonprofits to use to you know you know plumbing supply companies, right? So everybody's is using these. And it

Matthew Eshleman

I think seeing this here, right, it is shocking, maybe, right? Do you know, like, you know, there's all these different names. Um, and what are the AI use policies of these uh of these organizations? Do I trust them? Uh you know, there's some big name players here, right? Google Gemini and OpenAI and ChatGPT, right? Pop up pretty big, but then there's like common ninja, like I, you know, what is that and behive AI, right? So there's a lot of other tools that are um that you know that are out there uh all trying to make it in this um marketplace.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit about policies. Um we're gonna have to, I'm looking at the time, Matt, and thinking that we're gonna have to kind of speed through a couple of these slides.

Carolyn Woodard

I had a couple people ask in the chat, are we going to include all of the questions from chat and the QA and the answers? And yes, I will, Matt will help answer those and we'll put those in the transcript on our website. Um I because you're here as an attendee, you'll get an email with the link. But also if you ever want to look back, they're on our website. There's no paywall. So you can look back at all of our old uh webinars and see the transcripts and questions that people asked.

Carolyn Woodard

So we're gonna speed through quickly um co-pilot and Gemini, the two big ones. But as Matt just said, there's a bunch of other ones. Um, so you know, Matt, you're gonna talk a little bit more about using your company account and um, you know, just some how you how you know that you're using the right one.

Matthew Eshleman

Yes. So yeah, so thanks for putting up this um graphic because I think it's helpful to actually see what we're talking about here. Um so on um the right hand side, uh you can see this is my kind of edge browser, right? You can see my little picture in the upper right hand. And so whenever I go um to copilot.microsoft.com, I'm presented with this uh login option, right? Where I have an option on the left hand side to go to work, which they helpfully say is a secure and compliant copilot integrated with your enterprise account, right? So that's uh again,

Matthew Eshleman

if you have a Microsoft 365 account right now, you can click on that and you will be taken into a protected version of Copilot for basically interacting with the web or through uploading, you know, kind of content or copying and pasting things into that interactive window. Um, right, if you don't see it, right? So like

Matthew Eshleman

on the left, if you're just in Copilot, um, you know, this is an in-private window, right? That is not protected. And so uh the content that gets put in there is probably gonna be, you know, whatever. It's it's gonna not have those same um terms of conditions, terms and conditions um applied to it, and it is uh going to you know kind of feedback in the model, right? So so that's the top level. Um so

Matthew Eshleman

if you're on the enterprise side and you sign in, um now I have a Copilot license, and so you'll see under my account, right? I have the little tab at the top that says web or work, right? So that's a protected that's so if you have no license, you would just see the web tab. Um

Matthew Eshleman

if you have a Copilot license, you'll see the work tab, which means that you can then query information that you would have access to as part of your SharePoint OneDrive environment. So again,

Matthew Eshleman

we have the little enterprise data protection applies to this chat. Um you can see that I've got um some documents that I have accessed um previously, right? And so it gives you some prompting there uh to you know kind of give you a sense of you know what what is possible uh through the co-pilot. So this is this is what you would see if you had a copilot license assigned to your account. Um again, so you get the protected web search, but then you also uh get access to your kind of the organizational data side of things through your um through your account.

Carolyn Woodard

And I'll jump in and say, you know, Microsoft, there's like 20 different ways to do this as well. So if you're logged into your office account, like you're working, and you open a Word document, you'll also see the co-pilot icon in the top right. You can click on that and it'll open a little chat window for you to say, hey, can you help me draft this email or can you help me do this? The same thing with Excel, the same thing with PowerPoint. As long as you're in your work environment, you're logged into Office 365, all of those little tools are gonna have, and you have the Copilot license, the Copilot icon is gonna appear there and you'll be able to use it. So that's uh Copilot and Microsoft.

Carolyn Woodard

So the other big player, of course, with a lot of nonprofits is Google Workspace.

Matthew Eshleman

Yeah. So again, kind of a similar thing, right? If you are a uh Google Workspace customer and you are signed in, um by default, you're gonna get the enterprise protected version of uh of Gemini. Um and so you can again kind of do the searching if you have the license, right? So

Matthew Eshleman

if you've paid for a license of uh Gemini, then um you would get access again to the docs and sheets and presentations um that you have. Um, then I think

Matthew Eshleman

in addition, there's you know some neat things that Google has with their notebook LM, right, where you can initiate research. Uh, you know, I think it's really designed to um handle research projects. So again, if there's like a specific topic area or something that you want to find um more information about, I've been, you know, I've used this as well to uh again gather information about um a sector or um a certain you know topic area and kind of be able to build uh queries and questions around um something maybe that if I had the time, like I would spend a few hours doing and researching, um, but instead, you know, able to kind of feed it some information, uh provide some parameters, and then get some results back in you know 10 to 15, um, 10 to 15 minutes.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, it's amazing. You can give it documents from your organization, and then it's only going to look in those documents and give you back the answers. Um, you know, in some cases that maybe you've already vetted. So you have like an FAQ um document, and then it'll it'll reference that when it's uh when it's responding. I think

Carolyn Woodard

I want to make sure to I'm like everyone, I have multiple Google uh personas and uh profiles. So just a little word of warning, make sure you're logged into the right one, um, your work Google uh profile before using Gemini because otherwise you'll just be using, you know, random Gemini. Um okay.

Carolyn Woodard

So we're gonna go on, I think a little bit quickly. We have another poll for you. Um, several people have been asking in the chat and in the question about um how do you make sure that people at your organization are doing the things the way you want them to be doing them with AI tools?

Carolyn Woodard

And so this is a question: do you have AI policies at your organization?

Carolyn Woodard

The answers are, I don't think so, question mark. Don't know. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

the second answer you can give is we're in the process of creating policies. So you've taken some steps, but maybe not through the process.

Carolyn Woodard

And the third answer is yes, we have an AI acceptable use policy and our staff use it.

Carolyn Woodard

And then the fourth answer you can say is it just isn't really applicable to me. So I like to give people that option. Um, so

Carolyn Woodard

I'm gonna share with you the link to the template that's on our website for an AI acceptable use policy. Uh it's just a template. This is one of those things there's no, there's no one size fits all. You're gonna have to figure out with your organization where your values are, what people are comfortable with, what you're comfortable with as an organization. Um, so that's you know, you you can't just say, well, here's the policy, go ahead and use it. You're gonna have to individualize it. But

Carolyn Woodard

it looks like we have pretty good response rate. So I'm gonna go ahead and end the poll. Sorry I didn't give you very much warning and um share the results just so we stay on track. And uh, Matt, can you see that?

Matthew Eshleman

Uh yes, I can. Great. So majority of folks, 57%, are in the process of creating those policies now. So uh 13% said yes, they have a policy and everybody uses it. So uh, and then there are a quarter of folks that are saying, yeah, I don't know, I don't think so. Um so most folks are right in that process uh of developing a policy. And again, you know, I think that's what we find, right? Policy typically comes uh comes last, comes after the fact. It's hard, it's hard to do. Um, but it is really important to help guide those decisions that help in terms of organizational technology adoption.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, no, super important and difficult to do because it takes you know human brain thought. You're gonna have to sit down uh as a staff with your leadership and make a policy.

Carolyn Woodard

So, quick, quick, we're gonna go through why have a policy, how to get started on nonprofit and policies. Um, I think I'm gonna take this one, Matt, that um even just having a one-page outline with some of your principles or your values uh is better than not having anything. So

Carolyn Woodard

the person in the um chat who said, I wanted to be able to say no, we don't have a policy. Um, you get on that. So you keep asking the question. You may have a policy that you don't know about. Um, it may be in your employee handbook, like with the other acceptable use policies. So that's not very useful. Make sure that it's out there. Um

Carolyn Woodard

AI impacts are a leadership and board level conversation, and all those decisions need to include that leadership level. All staff can and should be involved in weighing options, learning the dangers, strategizing tasks to try with AI, and that's gonna you know influence your policy of what you can do this, what you don't want you to do this, all of those sorts of questions. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

one of the great things and amazing things about nonprofits is we have lots of knowledge about what your mission is throughout the organization. So doing some projects to get a lot of input from the staff into AI, what you're gonna use AI for, what you feel queasy about is really important, and it's pretty easy to do at a lot of nonprofits. They already have that kind of culture for sharing. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

you're gonna need to look at the ethics and impacts. There's lots of frameworks out there. We have a couple of webinars that we did on um uh ethical frameworks. I'm gonna share one in the chat just right now. Um that was a good framework for thinking about the ethics. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

this is something that I I heard recently, and it just really has I've been sitting with it that the having training and doing upskilling is something that nonprofits need to take really seriously. So you may have like professional development, and some people do it some of the time. AI tools is going to be something that we're gonna need a lot of training, collaborative training on, and again, those policies as well. So

Carolyn Woodard

getting AI literate on how you're using the tools, what you can use them for, um, how they can impact your mission, different communities you might be able to reach, more effective productivity, all of that is just so important to keep revisiting. And

Carolyn Woodard

you got to revisit it often because AI is evolving so quickly. It's the typical hockey stick on the statistics model of it's just going up. Um, so yeah,

Carolyn Woodard

we want to make sure that everyone is taking nonprofit AI training seriously. If you've been doing some training or you have some ideas, please put that in the chat. We'll share it in the transcript. Uh, your programs for training,

Carolyn Woodard

you can't just have an annual training or a video, like here's how you use AI. It's gonna have to be pretty frequent. You probably have champions and power users on your staff already that could you can you know be asking to help train the others.

Carolyn Woodard

I'm gonna share in the chat a document that I came across recently from the Department of Labor that outlines AI literacy, these different categories of literacy, both for your staff that you have, for staff that you're gonna be hiring, the kind of what are gonna be the standards around being able to use AI. So, this document I found is really gonna help you get started. Um, and then again, just revisit your training program frequently, get a lot of feedback on what's working.

Carolyn Woodard

Thank you to everyone who's putting the feedback in the chat right now. Um, I love that. That's that's really helpful. Um and yeah, that was our next question was to share in chat. How are you approaching AI policies and training and what's working?

Carolyn Woodard

In the interest of time, I'm gonna turn it. I'm sorry, we ran through that very quickly. Um, these slides will be available on the website. We'll have the transcript in the website as well. We'll be answering all of these questions in the website, um, on the website in the transcript. Well,

Carolyn Woodard

Matt, I wanted to turn it back over to you to kind of summarize how to use AI tools safely. What would you say?

Matthew Eshleman

Yeah, so obviously that policy background I think is really important, right? And just to get people in the organization talking together around, yeah, what does it mean for us to use these technology tools, right? And

Matthew Eshleman

I do think, you know, in the in the wisdom of my 24 years, you know, working at technology, right? When I first started, you know, the questions that we were having at clients is like, does everybody need an email address? Do we really need internet access at all these locations, right? And so those technology tools have, you know, obviously proved to be very um effective.

Matthew Eshleman

So I think AI, right, is a technology tool that we cannot ignore. And you know, likely, you know, whatever, 10 years from now, we'll be saying, yes, everybody needs these um tools to help them um with their job. I think, but

Matthew Eshleman

I think it also means that it's important for organizations to look at, you know, what is the problem that we're trying to solve. So if if you know it's like, hey, all right, now everybody has Copilot licenses, okay, so you know, go forth. But if you haven't articulated, well, what is the issue that we're trying to solve, right? Is our is our, you know, obviously things like meeting, note taking, and action items, right, is a pretty clear use case. That's something I think a lot of people can get on, right?

Matthew Eshleman

But if the problem you're trying to solve is related to kind of grant application, right, just throwing an AI tool in it may not be the solution that um gets you the result that you're looking for. So

Matthew Eshleman

I think it's important for organizations to really define, hey, like let's not talk about the technology first, let's talk about the process and and what we're trying to get at before we apply a technology solution to it. So I think that's important. Um, so we're not just kind of looking at the technology first uh and trying to figure out what we can solve with it. Um again, we

Matthew Eshleman

I think we've really advocated and you know, been I think big fans of of having a team or a working group to figure those things out, right? Uh you know, while everybody at the organization may be interested in it, right? Maybe we just need to empower a couple uh you know, a few folks to to really pilot and explore these issues.

Matthew Eshleman

I think this is another example, right, where the kind of the fail fail fast uh mantra is really helpful, right? You're gonna want to try and explore a lot of different things and kind of figure out what works, what doesn't, you know, what we need to adjust. Um, and doing that with a small group uh then can feedback best practices for the broader organization uh will make you, I think, a lot more effective in the long term. Um and then again, uh, you know, there's some questions about this coming in, right?

Matthew Eshleman

What is currently in use and define some guardrails, right? So coming back to that previous example, your organization, people are already using these tools. They're using stuff that you've never even heard of. Um, and so having a conversation about use this, not that, what do we want to do? How does this impact our organization if we're using tools that we don't understand the terms and conditions, the data privacy, right? So being able to understand what is currently in use, I think is really important. Um,

Matthew Eshleman

because at the end of the day, right, people want to be able to do their job uh kind of quickly and effectively. And so I think it means working with staff to you know have creative uh you know kind of problem solving and not just blocking all AI, right? I because I think that's um probably impractical for most of our uh organizations. Um so kind of identifying or understanding what is the problem that they're trying to solve, what are the tools that they're using. Maybe if you do an evaluation and decide, well, we that that tool actually doesn't have as uh good of privacy controls as we would like. What is another option that we could use to help address the need, but then also meet our organization's requirements around privacy and um data protection.

Matthew Eshleman

So all of that to say, you got to keep talking and keep iterating, right? This is uh you know, rapidly evolving, I think faster than many of us, you know, have the capacity to deal with the change. And so you, you know, but uh you got to kind of jump jump in and uh and and keep keep on it.

Carolyn Woodard

I'm gonna put up this um slide for everyone who can um see it. You can book some time with um Matt to ask him more questions about cybersecurity, AI and cybersecurity. Um, also just put it in the um chat file as well.

Carolyn Woodard

And then again, um Matt is answering questions on our Reddit um community fairly, you know, once a week or so. So you can ask questions of us there as well. I know that we barely were able to answer the questions today, and I apologize, but we only had an hour and I um feel like Matt, you did answer a lot of our questions. Um thank you so, so much. Um

Carolyn Woodard

I'm gonna go back over our learning objectives. Um we wanted to learn the difference between enterprise or subscription AI tools and those freemium tools that are free out there. Um, and I think uh Matt, you did a good job of just describing you get what you pay for. If you aren't paying for a license, then they are using your information that you're uploading and their outputs to it and their language, their learning model is using that. So just be aware of that. There are some ways that you can turn that off, even for the freemium versions. Um, so you can Google those types of um options, but it does reduce the functionality of it. So as an organization, you want to make sure that you're investing in those enterprise uh-wide versions. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

we wanted to go over accessing the Microsoft Copilot and Google Workspace Gemini tools at the organizational level. We had to go through that pretty quickly. Sorry, that was like rapid fire. But um, it's gonna be different. It's gonna look different a little bit for different uh organizations depending on how you're accessing it. Like I said, for Microsoft, there's 20 different ways to do one different thing. So um that is one of those things. Talk to your IT people, keep talking about it, ask your questions around the staff, um, ask people that are you know better at IT than are than you are. Um, and and it may be something that's very unique to your organization as well. Uh

Carolyn Woodard

reviewing those IT policy guidelines, thinking about the amount of training that these tools are going to require, they seem so easy, they've been marketed to us, is you just ask it your question and it answers you. It's this great, amazing thing that's so easy to use.

Carolyn Woodard

But what a lot of nonprofits are finding is that there's a lot of upfront time and energy that you want to put into thinking about the challenges, thinking about what you're trying to do with AI, thinking about the ethical issues, thinking about your policy, putting all those things in place. So there is a cost, even though it's quote unquote free to use or low cost if you're just paying, you know, $20 or $30 for a license. It's it's really, it's been very easy to adopt. And I think we're kind of catching up with there's lots of questions that you need to answer as an organization. Um, and then yeah,

Carolyn Woodard

I'm sorry, I still had this learning objective on there was uh understanding uh unique challenges in AI in cybersecurity when we overshare. I think actually everyone in here is very aware of that difficulty of oversharing your sensitive information with these uh free tools. Um, so that is heartening to understand.

Carolyn Woodard

Matt is going to be back here in April doing a webinar on cybersecurity. There will be a ton of cybersecurity and AI in that webinar. So I invite you to come back for that. Uh, hopefully, we'll have a little bit more time to talk about it. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

for next month, we are going to change gears a little bit and talk about going from being an accidental techie to being an intentional nonprofit tech leader. We have two amazing guests who are going to be with us: Hugo Castro, who is the author of the Accidental Techie newsletter on LinkedIn, a great friend of community IT, a long friend of ours, and uh Gozi Egbuono, who is also just a long-standing friend of ours and who actually moved through being the accidental techie to now being a technologist. So she's gonna talk about her lived experience.

Carolyn Woodard

They're gonna talk about ways to move from being the person who's always helping with IT for free at your organization to becoming that strategic and intentional nonprofit tech leader. Um, so I invite you to come back for that.

Carolyn Woodard

That is at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific on Wednesday, March 25th, the month from today. Please don't forget as you're leaving today to take our short survey. One lucky winner chosen at random will receive a $25 gift certificate for helping us learn more about how we're doing. Um, and then also join us on Reddit R slash nonprofit IT management for more QA with Matt for the next 30 minutes or so. Um, it's kind of hard for me to take the questions from the chat and put them in the Reddit chat. So I apologize for that, but I will be loading them up over the next couple of days. So if your question didn't get answered and you're on Reddit, please join us there. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

we'll love to get your answer back to you or check back in the transcript in a week or two, and we're gonna add on all of the questions that we didn't get to and Matt's answers to those. And it's gonna be a lot. So it may be it may be two weeks before we get that up there, but please come back and we just appreciate your time so much today. Thank you everyone who joined us. I hope these resources were uh were helpful to you.

Carolyn Woodard

Matt, thank you so much for your time today.

Matthew Eshleman

Yeah, thanks. You've covered a lot. I'm here, I'm here responding to questions on Reddit. So, yeah, another plug to uh to kind of hop over there and and ask if we didn't get um get to something. There's a lot of good questions. I don't know that I have answers for uh for all of them, but I think it's a good conversation to have.

Carolyn Woodard

That's one of the things for AI is that none of us are experts. If you have a consultant or a company that's telling you they know everything about AI, they are lying. Because maybe they knew it yesterday, but it's different today. Um, that's for sure.

Carolyn Woodard

We went over a little bit here. I appreciate everyone who's still with us. Um thank you again so much, Matt. Thank you, everyone who is with us on the website and the webinar. Uh, your time is a gift. We appreciate it, and we'll see you over on Reddit or uh next month back at our next webinar. Thank you. Thanks, Matt.

Matthew Eshleman

Great. Thanks, C arolyn. See ya.

Speaker 1

Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two. You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.