The Soul of the Profession

The advancement profession is entering an era of rapid experimentation with artificial intelligence. We are told that autonomous AI agents could automate nearly every aspect of an advancement operation: data entry, research, prospect identification, portfolio management, meeting preparation, stewardship, communications, data maintenance, and other activities that have historically occupied significant portions of advancement staff members’ time.

Much of this experimentation is marketed to our field as an opportunity to eliminate “low-value” work so that fundraisers can spend more time on “high-value” human relationships. No one disputes that fundraisers should be out in front of donors more.

We ask a different question: What happens to a profession when it automates the work through which people become professionals?

Entry-level advancement jobs are not simply collections of low-value tasks. They are the on ramp into the profession. They are where people acquire institutional knowledge, practice judgment, observe experienced fundraisers, learn how donors behave, develop technical fluency, and begin building the professional capital that eventually allows them to assume more senior and consequential roles.

Some of the work performed in entry-level advancement positions is tedious. Some should absolutely be automated. The question is not whether automation is permissible. It is whether advancement leaders are accounting for the developmental function of the work they automate. Increasingly, it seems to us that they are not.

This matters because the advancement profession already has significant inequities in compensation, representation, and access to leadership. If organizations disproportionately eliminate the roles through which people enter and advance within the profession, the effects will not be evenly distributed. The result could be a profession that is more productive in the short term but less capable of sustaining itself in the long term.

This is not an argument against technology. It is an argument for the soul of the profession.

Advancement leaders should ask not only what AI can do for today’s workforce, but what happens to tomorrow’s workforce when AI performs the work through which people learn to become fundraisers.