“Smart tech” is an umbrella term we created to describe advanced digital technologies that make decisions for people, instead of people. It includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its subsets and cousins such as machine learning, natural language processes, smart forms, and chatbots, robots, and drones.

Right now, smart tech is best at doing rote tasks like filling out intake forms, and answering the same questions over and again (“is my contribution tax-deductible?”). However, the technology is quickly embedding itself into the heart of nonprofit work in a wide variety of functions. As a result, we anticipate that staff will be free to focus on other activities. We call this benefit the “dividend of time,” which can be used to, say, reduce staff burnout, get to know clients in deeper ways, and focus on problem-solving like addressing the root causes of homelessness in addition to serving homeless people.

Smart tech has recently reached an inflection point common to technologies that reach everyday use: An enormous increase in computing power meets a dramatic decrease in the cost of the technology. As a result, technology that was previously available only to elite institutions like NASA or embedded in widely complicated systems has suddenly become available to everyday people and organizations for fundraising, accounting, human resources, service delivery, and more.

Grabbing software off-the-shelf that is “smart” may look like a technical decision, at its heart it is a deeply and profoundly human challenge that requires informed leadership to do well. There is a sweet spot of balancing the capability of the technology with the interests and needs of the people inside and outside that organizations need to identify. Some people call this convergence “co-botting.” The responsibility for identifying this sweet spot cannot rest with the IT department alone. Organizational leaders need to be interested, knowledgeable, and engaged enough to ensure smart tech is used in human-centered ways.

In the following excerpt from our chapter on staying human-centered in our new book, The Smart Nonprofit, we discuss how being human-centered means prioritizing the interests, strengths, and unique talents of people over the speed and wizardry of the technology. Valuing humans has never been more important as our workplaces become more and more automated.

Read the full article about balancing human-centered smart technology by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter at Stanford Social Innovation Review.