Bridging the AI divide: Pittsburgh leaders on why nonprofits should lead the revolution

by James Paul

Fred Brown uses artificial intelligence to organize his notes, tease out data for audacious projects and operationalize lofty goals. Brown, the president and CEO of The Forbes Funds, said he's currently focused on getting AI in the hands of people who look more like him—demographic minority leaders of nonprofits in the greater Pittsburgh region.

"If we don't ensure that the most vulnerable people in our region have access to tools or resources to allow them, support them and encourage them to compete in the 21st-century global economy, we are going to short-circuit any real success we have in the region," Brown said in an hour-long interview with the Pittsburgh Startup News .

The Forbes Funds is a supporting organization of The Pittsburgh Foundation that aims to help community-based nonprofits and human services organizations improve their management skills and increase the impact of their work. Over 500 greater-region nonprofits are collected under the organization's Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership (GPNP) umbrella.

Brown, who has been at the organization's helm for just over six years, spearheaded the 2018 restructuring of its grant procedure, helped establish a slew of new international partnerships and oversaw the implementation of a gamified leadership training cohort.

The Forbes Funds distinguish themselves as committed to including racially diverse and economically neglected nonprofits in the region’s growth, Brown said.

Along with private-sector companies from Walmart to Abercrombie and Fitch, who are hedging their bets that AI will enhance productivity, Brown said The Forbes Funds are striving to provide AI technology and training to GPNP member organizations for a reduced cost so that the players who typically get pushed to a familiar wayside instead spearhead the implementation of AI technology.

The Forbes Funds announced last month that it's launching three AI cohorts focused on getting nonprofit and social impact leaders comfortable with AI tools, increasing worker productivity and implementing new personalized models to power data-backed decision-making. The cohorts will be launched among GPNP members later this month.

Brown said he imagines AI freeing up non-profit leaders' valuable man-hours that could be better spent forging partnerships with the 2,700 other nonprofits in the six-county Pittsburgh region or allowing them to tactically maneuver around stretched grant funding, giving "them tools to be more effective with less."

"We have to also ask the deeper question," Brown said. "What will it take for the sector to support a region-wide AI initiative that integrates a cross-sectoral set of players that produces the healthiest region? What would that look like?"

Scott Lammie, a board member emeritus of The Forbes Funds who has been with the organization for over 12 years, says The Forbes Funds have always committed themselves to building the capacity of local nonprofits. But when Brown came on board, Lammie said their mission expanded.

"We realized that we're not solving many of the issues that we exist to try to address, particularly the disparities that exist across communities within our region," Lammie said.

It’s in these disparities that Brown said he can envision an alternative, equally dystopian AI-backed future. If AI tools exponentially increase the productivity of some, as others remain stagnant, Brown said the world would further split between the "haves and the have-nots." He warns of catastrophe separate from speculation of a Skynet-esque superpower.

"If we don't address the issue that we're confronting now, we're going to see civil wars and civil discourse take place at an epic level," Brown said. "You just can't keep making money [while] other people are starving."

While Brown is concerned with ensuring AI is adopted at all levels of the nonprofit space, Lance Lindauer , the executive director of the Partnership to Advance Responsible Technology (PART), wants to ensure the technology is used and developed responsibly.

Lindauer, who formerly served as the director of operations for the National Defense Research Institute at the RAND Corporation, said PART emerged six years ago as a "coffee club" for local entrepreneurs, autonomous system developers and policymakers to discuss how Pittsburgh, then a fledgling nexus on the East Coast's tech scene, could grow its local industry while minimizing global harm.

Over the past six years and across several conferences hosted by PART, Lindauer said PART began to view AI as a powerful tool with coincidingly deadly potential. He said that beyond the risks of, say, a weapons system with free thought, there are more immediate threats of an autonomous financial lending system overlooking valid loan requests, for example.

"Six years ago and definitely before that, there would be a hard line between artificial intelligence and then other parts of technology," Lindauer said. "Now they're almost synonymous. The lines are really blurred. When you say technology, you just basically wrap in AI.

Lindauer said PART, which also consults companies on how to implement burgeoning technologies responsibly, is freed by its nonprofit status and additional grant funding to act in society's best interests and only take on clients it's ideologically aligned with. He said PART has worked with local universities and nonprofit incubator and accelerator groups to establish core tenets of safety in emerging startups.

PART has also run K-12 education programs, giving those as young as six years old their first introduction to online privacy and governance topics, which Lindauer expects will only become more pertinent in the coming decades.

While Pittsburgh grows its host of tech companies—representing 13.8% of all companies in the region in 2022, according to the Pittsburgh Technology Council’s annual report —Lindauer envisions a parallel growth of the city as a conversation-setting waystar in AI and broader technology regulation safeguards.

"What we are attempting to do is put Pittsburgh on a global standing, and we really want this to be the headquarters of responsible AI and ethical uses of technology,” Lindauer said.

Brown said Pittsburgh’s nonprofits—which he noted account for $9 billion of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s income—were critical to the region's rise from a “rust belt to a brain belt.”

Now, with the economic, on top of the financial, potential of AI just being realized, Brown wants to impress the importance of including minorities, by way of Greater Pittsburgh’s nonprofit landscape, in that space.

“The nonprofit ecosystem is synonymous with creating pathways to move people from surviving to thriving in a critical way,” Brown said. “it also provides a space where under-resourced, underserved populations and people can gain transferable work skills when done in a tangible and measurable way.”