Name: Belonging In the Age of AI: Social Impact, Trust, and Employee Engagement in the Age of Disruption
Uploaded: 2026-05-04T19:15:58.666Z
Duration: 47 min
Description: Belonging In the Age of AI: Social Impact, Trust, and Employee Engagement in the Age of Disruption

Transcript for "Belonging In the Age of AI: Social Impact, Trust, and Employee Engagement in the Age of Disruption": Hello and welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today for our belonging in the age of AI, social impact trust and employee engagement in the age of disruption discussion and webinar. We're so excited to have our very own Dale Strange from YourCause from Blackbaud and Brian Reaves from Belonging Intelligence for this important virtual Firefly chat today. We're so excited to have all of you with us as well. Now before we dive into today's conversation, we do want to take a moment just to go through a couple of very quick housekeeping items. First and foremost, for your best experience as you're watching today's webinar, we do recommend that you use the Chrome browser or another well known browser. And if at any time you're experiencing some lag within the broadcast, we do encourage you to just check your internet speed, maybe close some of the other windows or tabs that you might have open on your computer or you can always hit refresh on your browser as well to refresh and come back into the experience. Also throughout today's webinar, we have a couple of different tools available to you up on the upper right hand side of your screen. First and foremost, you will see a chat tab and so I'd encourage all of you to locate that chat tab. And if you're comfortable, we would love for you to all to just share in that chat tab today your name, maybe the organization that you're with, and also where you're dialing in from today. Love to see who all is joining us throughout the chat and certainly feel free to keep the conversation going throughout the chat throughout today's session as well. Next to that, you'll also see a docs tab which provides links to a bunch of additional helpful resources. And so we encourage you to feel free to explore all the links within that docs tab. Do also keep in mind that we will be providing a recording of today's session after today's webinar and we will provide those links and resources again as well. And then finally, please notice that there is also a Q and A tab that is visible. And so as through we go throughout today's conversation, if you have any questions that you'd like to ask Dale and Brian, please do drop those specifically in the q and a tab so that when we get to the end of today's session and open up for a little bit of audience q and a, we have the opportunity to see your questions. With that, without any further ado, I'm going to pass it right over to Dale Strange to kick us off with a little bit of context before we dive into today's conversation. Dale, over to you. Thank you so much, Andrew, and hello, everyone. Brian and I are so excited to be together with you all for today's conversation. It is an important one on the topic of AI and the importance of belonging in the age of AI, and we are so honored that you all are joining us for today's conversation. I wanted to start just by stating the obvious, and that is that we're at a moment right now where AI is completely reshaping the pace of work and how work is done in our organizations. No matter what our organization is, it is transformative, by design. We've never seen a technology as transformative as this is, and it's an important opportunity for us. It also is important to recognize that this transformative technology is available to us at a time where we're seeing incredible amounts of change, fatigue, uncertainty within our lot of our programs, and a growing gap between leadership perception and the employee experience. And, in fact, we are, going to be talking today about the fact that 38% named job security as their number one concern right now from an employee perspective. Great Places to Work Institute research shows that 83% of executives feel very well informed about AI's impact, but only 37% of individual contributors in our companies and our organizations do. And when asked what concerns the most about AI, as you might imagine, 38% say it was this point of job security that rises up. So the gap is not just about messaging. It really is a true crisis that's hiding in plain sight. And Brian and I are looking forward to sharing some thoughts with you during our time together today on some helpful tips on how to bridge that trust gap. The social impact programs that you all lead, and, again, we are humbled by the impact that you all are providing through your work to benefit society. But these are strategic levers for connection, and I think this becomes really important as we think about how to utilize this as we go forward. The the role of social impact, volunteerism, culture initiatives, they're not just expressions of values. They could be measurable trust and connection, ingredients to infrastructure that we can have when in when they're designed intentionally. So we're gonna unpack today what it takes to build belonging at scale in this age of AI that we're in and why social impact can be a strategic lever and also how leaders can move beyond participation metrics to evidence based insight. By way of introduction, we will use a fireside chat format. I've had the good pleasure of knowing, Brian for quite some time. So, you know, this feels very much like, like, two friends that are sitting down having some of the many conversations that Brian and I have had on these topics over, recent quarters and years. Just by way of introduction, as Andrew mentioned at the top of the call, my name is Dale Strange. I am president of corporate impact here at Blackbaud, which means I have the honor of leading our your calls from YourCause from Blackbaud business, which is the leading operating system for corporate impact, powering, employee giving, volunteerism, engagement, and impact measurement reporting to hundreds and hundreds of companies across the world doing the good work that those purpose driven companies do every day. And, Brian, I'll turn it over to you to, introduce yourself. Great to see you again. Great to be with you in Las Vegas, and thanks for those stats. And I will, mention the Great Place to Work, Summit and some of the research, during our conversation. Hello, everyone. I strongly believe that I've spent the last three decades of my career, although I'm getting old, at the intersection of technology and people leadership. I've been blessed enough to have a successful career developing software and people at many companies, including the last three, SAP, Dell Technologies, and UKG. But ten months ago, I decided to lean heavily into what I believe to be the biggest technological and business disruption of my generation, at least, that being artificial intelligence. And I started a company called Belonging Intelligence. So just by way of what does that mean, those words are kinda weird together, you know, I define it I define Belonging Intelligence as the capacity of an organization to convert human difference into strategic advantage within a business, and that's what we help companies do, especially in times of disruption. We believe that during extraordinary disruption, companies need to be data driven and data led. So at its core, Belonging Intelligence, as we call belonging intelligence, is a strategic consulting company, and we're ready to help our customers meet the challenges and opportunities caused during this age of AI disruption. We happen to be blessed to be a strategic partner at Great Place to Work. We leverage the Great Place to Work trust index. I hope some of your companies do as well because it's the gold standard in workplace trust measurement for thirty years, and you must measure everything during this time. We also have developed, some AI infused innovation, and we leverage other great partners like FiveDynamics with their simplified platform, as well as a next generation microlearning platform for Hive Learning that I'd be happy to share more about. We have an extraordinary set of consulting partners, industry partners as well. So I welcome this conversation. I believe in the principles of belonging intelligence as they separate companies that talk about inclusion from companies that actually use it. And we really believe that one's proximity to the customer, to the work, to the risk, to the opportunity become really decision grade intelligence that a business can act upon. So thank you for the privilege, Dale, of having this conversation. I know our lunch sessions have been awesome, so it's good to bring it bring everybody into what we've been talking about. Yes. This is, very much like us and a couple of 100 of our friends, in the conversations that we've been having. And it's an honor to be with you, Brian, and with everyone. Before we kick off our fireside chat, we would love to, keep it interactive and do a bit of a poll. We would love to get this group's thoughts on a couple of polls that we'll do during our time together. And the first poll we'd start love to start with is just where you are on your own AI journey within your organization, how you would describe your organization's AI reality today. Are you experimenting? Have you started but paused? Are you scaling very aggressively? Not quite sure, somewhere in pockets. We'd love for your feedback on this, and we'll open the poll so that you all can respond to this. We will see what the audience has to say about where you are in this journey. We'll give it just a moment. Like, that Jeopardy music is in my head, Dale, as this is going on. There you go. If we would have been more creative, we could have had that going in the background. Next time, we will do And Andrew will let us know when we have enough responses to close the poll out. You still have just a few more seconds to get in with your individual answers. That part was. Alright. Andrew, what do you think? Let's say you. We are all closed, and it looks like the vast majority are scaling broadly. Uh-oh. Although. there are some experimenting and some scaling in pockets. We did not get any votes for paused or not sure. Okay. That is, that is fantastic. It is good to. see that happening. Of course, that comes with some really interesting opportunities that will set up today's conversation well. So, thank you all. Thank you for that. We'll do a couple more polls as we go. But with that, we'll jump right into our questions. And I I have the honor of, first asking Brian a few questions, then Brian will ask me a few questions, then we'll do a little bit of back and forth. But I'd like to start, Brian, first by a question to you about the work that's happening right now. And the the question on my mind is when when you look at inclusion and belonging work right now in this moment, what what do you see that's actually changing, and what do you think leaders are underestimating in this moment? That's a great great question. Well, you know, first of all, I believe the principles of inclusion, belonging, and, you know, I've introduced belonging intelligence are are timeless in nature. They're relevant in a merger or market downturn and an upturn, just like they are in AI transformation that's going on in disruption today. Now the constant is disruption. There's always change going on. The difference is velocity. And I think that's what's happening now is the the pace of change influenced by AI or other things are really, really challenging people in a way, that they're figuring out having to pivot. So to prove the timeless part, let me I'm gonna age myself a little bit, Dale, and I'll come back to to your question. So back in nineteen eighty three ish, I was a Xerox. I was a intern at Xerox Corporation. At that time, the Japanese competitors had taken Xerox from about 80% of market share in the copier business to about 13% in six years. So talking about that that level of disruption. Great CEO, gentleman named David Kearns, no longer on Earth with us now, but an amazing person, made a very strategic decision that it wasn't about product innovation. It was about people. And so he started an a an initiative called Leadership Through Quality and invested about a 125,000,000 in training employees. And the training was on how do you drive decision making down to the frontline. He gave frontline workers real authority over day to day decisions, not just executives. You made every single person accountable and responsible for fixing the quality that was broken and that had lost that market share. And the result of that, if you fast forward six years later, was Xerox winning the Molten Dollar's reward. So what does did that tell me, and what did I learn from that? Well, that was inclusion and belonging in practice because Belonging Intelligence, as a word, happened there. They drove the culture became that of the people and everyone's human difference being the superpower. So when you talk about what's changing now, my honest answer is the work itself isn't changing. The stakes are higher. For forty years, organizations have underinvested in belonging and still hit their numbers because the cost was slow, and it was easy to externalize. But the age of AI disruption compressed that timeline. I talked about that acceleration. So I believe that AI doesn't create the trust gap. It actually exposes it in these times. So what I believe leaders are underestimating is they're treating belonging as a cultural initiative. They dial it up or down depending on budgets. AI is not transformation. I believe it's a stress test, and that's a little controversial, I know. And every AI decision your leadership team makes is going to land on top of whatever trust architecture you already have built. So if you have a really bad trust architecture, it's going to cave like it's happening for certain companies. But for those companies that understand the human the difference is strength and a strategic advantage, I think those companies are gonna be the winning companies, Dale. And I think some of those companies hopefully are on this call today. Yeah. I certainly hope so. And with the trust gap being so pronounced, these days, the it occurs to me the opportunity for this group, corporate social responsibility leaders, to really help companies in this. moment where that help is needed to aligning our CSR programs to be more intentional about belonging is a a real opportunity. So thank you for that, Brian. You know, as we. as we, invited our friends to join us today, the premise of our session was that trust is the missing variable in, many engagement strategies that are out there. Where does that show up in the data that you see? I know you see a lot of data through the work that you do. Yeah. You called it out earlier on. I love that you pulled the data from the latest last year's great place to work AI insights study, where you spoke about, the the general question was that, you know, who feels informed about AI strategy within the organization? And as you articulated, 83% of executives said that they felt informed about how AI is changing, you know, their organization, but only 37% of the individual contributors said the same. So that 46% gap is massive, and that was several thousand companies that took the survey, Dale Strange. And there were customers, a great place to work, and non customers across all industries. So that is a significant problem. And but but here's here's the the the the challenges. That dangerous part isn't that it was a gap in information. Most of these companies are sending emails, hosting town halls, doing webcast like ours, and running training, but it's a gap in belief. And when you have employees that don't believe in your strategy, that's when things fall apart. And then you said the second most important stat I thought was and what are people worried about right now during this age of AI disruption? They're worried about their jobs. Job security was number one. In fact, it was sustainability, I believe, wasn't until the seventh or eighth, you know, sort of most thing that most people worried about. So we have the situation. We've got a workforce that doesn't believe in what leadership is telling them and where they're leading, and they're most afraid that they're even gonna have a job. And that's really not a communication failure. Again, as an engineer, I keep coming back to what is that architecture. And that's where most engagement strategies miss out entirely. They measure satisfaction. They measure participation. They measure whether people like working at a company. They don't measure where whether employees believe what their leaders are telling them and whether those whether they will follow those leaders. So, you know, believing in trust is really about values. You have to purposely architect it in every element of your business strategy as though it's an operating system. Then you can pull an annular benefit from it. Without that, again, things will fall apart. Yeah. It's in indeed, that's true. And there's such a tremendous opportunity, particularly at executive levels. The data shows us that in, almost every company. Speaking of executive levels, and, again, you you work with a lot of executives across lots of different industries and companies. There are myths out there that we see. What what's one myth about belonging work that you'd love to see retired at the executive level? Oh my goodness. In this day and time, I'd like a lot of myths to to be retired. That said, the myth that, you know, comes top of mind for me right now that I retire tomorrow, and it goes to maybe my last answer, which is belonging is a communication problem. People just think that they can communicate, you know, through more town halls and clearer messaging and hiring new internal comms folks or external comms folks. And the reality is those tactics really have the impact or success desired. So, you know, six months later, when, you know, all these investments have gone in, Dale, we've made, you know, as executives, then we see the numbers, and we still, you know, think that trust we see that trust is not, evolving to where it needs to be. And in many cases, the situation is even worse, like when they have geopolitical economic uncertainty, which in many cases is accelerated by this AI disruption. So here's what I do believe. You cannot over or out communicate a structural trust gap. Meaning, if you have again, that that that architecture is broken, you can't use, you know, communication to solve it. If your incentive system, your reward system for projecting confidence, if that's what you're telling your leaders to do, then they're gonna be out of alignment with what really is the problem. So belonging is not a communication problem. It's an architecture problem. Until executive teams are willing to look at look underneath. Have you built trust in every layer? You'll be mistaking and hearing the wrong signals. So, mine is fix the architecture, drive empathy, trust, belonging as your foundation, and those outcomes will happen. But it's not about communication Yeah. only. I'm gonna ask you one more, and then we'll, we'll switch gears and turn the table, a little bit. But I I mentioned earlier when I was opening up our, time here with our friends about the pace of AI that I think we'd all agree with is moving faster than most organizations can keep up with and and adopt. From from your perspective, what what is the number one cultural failure that, leaders trigger unintentionally when they push adoption? Yeah. You know, I in thinking about, you know, when when we were prepping for this, I was like, you know, how do how do I articulate? I I came up with this concept called I call it the mandate trap. You know, leaders and and, again, I in in this world now too, when we look at the AI landscape, we recognize it's a competitive risk. That's what we're trained to do, and we do exactly what you expect high functioning leadership teams team to do. We have a playbook. They make it we make it a strategic priority. We set adoption targets for for AI. We build a road map, and we hold people accountable. And on paper, you know, that playbook used to work. But what I've come to realize, certainly in the work we're doing, Dale, is in practice, it triggers a thing that we're trying to prevent. Because what's happening underneath is you're issuing a mandate into a work face workforce where remember that number. 38% of the people believe AI is gonna take their jobs. So what you you're not really driving adoption. You're driving fear underground. So it'll show up as workarounds. You have people performative compliance. Shadow AI, you'll hear that term. Look it up. Quiet attrition of the top performers. People are stepping out, and giving you all kinds of other reasons that aren't the truth. And at every layer the mandate passes through has to cascade it to the lower level. Except those leaders doing the cascade, they don't believe it either. So then you have this combinatorial problem because, again, that that architecture hasn't been fixed. So the leaders who get it right need to invert it. You have to build trust first, then introduce the tools on top so that you can drive and close that gap and accelerate from there. So, yeah, it's it's again, this is we are in an uncharted territory, and new strategies and tactics need to be deployed. But, yeah, let's let's flip let let's go ahead and flip and turn the table. That was some good questions that I hope I can answer ask as good ones. I know you'll answer great, but let's kick up to another poll. Alright, Andrew? I think we've got a poll that we said we would do. So the poll is, what do you think the biggest AI disconnect or where do you think the biggest AI disconnect shows up? So, Andrew, I'll let you you take the time. And when you're ready to come back, with the results, that'd be fantastic. Four votes. Timing and pace is dropping off the page. Yes. Training and readiness. Training is, such an important one where a lot of. organizations really are just not mature yet in how training is provided, specifically to use cases and departments. So I'm not surprised to see that one so prominent. Yes. Because it's sort of the general training that's going on, really empowering people with the training necessary to do their job better. There's Andrew. He's about to pop up. You got it? Alright. And we've closed all. And as you can see, training and readiness absolutely is in the lead. Excellent. Excellent. Well, here we go, Jill. So, you know, you know, we we spent a lot of time together as you said, and and you said, you know, social impact, you know, you've not only to me, but on a broader stage, you've talked about how social impact and culture initiatives can become strategic levers and disruption. So we we talk about it's all about the business. Can you share the clearest example you've seen where SCSR strengthened trust and not just participation? Yeah. I I I do believe that CSR has an opportunity to be a really it always has been an important ingredient to that. But in this moment where the trust gap is so large, as we said when we started the call, I think there's a tremendous opportunity for our CSR, program to help companies bridge that gap. Know, what what I think is that CSR initiatives build trust among employees whenever we can align the company values to our personal beliefs. You don't always. see that. But when you see that, that is when you see, high levels of trust, in my opinion, start to emerge, and it leads to there was some, a report out that, was maybe a year and a half or so ago, and it said that the sense of belonging can be five or six times higher whenever those two things happen, whenever we see those, CSR initiatives that align company, priorities to the personal beliefs that we have. And I think that's pretty logical because it gives you a sense that, you know, we are participating in programs that are deeply personal. And it it really comes down to, I think, when. when employees can see companies that are doing the right things, that is very important and has direct correlation. And one of the areas that I would say we often see this alignment the most are in moments of uncertainty, especially when you. you think about things like crisis response and our CSR programs where leaders often moved authentically, they moved fast, they moved responsibly. And it's in moments like that that we can see tremendous examples where, the CSR, program itself and the ability for CSR to unite our employee base and connect us to community can build trust. And that's a testament to the work that everyone on this call does, the work that we do. We have a very important role to play in helping with this trust gap that we started our call out with today. No. I love that. I love that, Dale. And then when we actually infuse AI into it because that's everything you said has been true some of the beginning of time. But what's the most valuable question AI can help CSR leaders answer that they couldn't answer before? So, you know, AI is a answer to a quiz. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there there are so many uses of AI, and I I love being in spaces with, CSR leaders where we're talking about how everyone's using AI, and we're in a learning posture because this this community is really doing some amazing things now that we have this tool at our, disposal. And certainly across the YourCause platform, we're bringing AI forward capabilities across every corner of the platform from grant making to volunteering, employee giving, and everything in between. But I would say the one that I see the most that AI has really helped us with is around impact measurement reporting. It has been a challenge for a very long time of how we measure the impact and tell the stories of total impact that we have had. I don't have to tell those that are on this call that, you know, data is in disparate places. Our volunteering data may be in one place, our employee giving data in another, trying to find lines of business investments in community, formal foundation grant making. And then pulling that all together has been very hard to do, but not in the age of AI. We deployed a product called ImpactEdge that is an AI powered tool that really, at a moment's notice, allows us to pull all of that together and be able to know the impact that we've made across our entire value chain and how we did to, make that happen so that we can optimize it proactively in the future. So that's one of many examples that are out there, but it's one that I think has profound benefit for the work that we all do as CSR professionals. And you're absolutely right. I mean, we it was in my last role. You know, you all helped us, implement Impact Edge, and it was a game changer. So, well well spoken. We speak a lot, Dale, around, you know, ethics and and AI, and I know a lot of governance is moving so fast. That's a challenge. But, I'd like to ask you, what's the ethical line your team thinks about most when applying AI and CSR and all that great innovation, especially as it pertains to bias or privacy, transparency, other, topics that come top of mind. Yeah. It's so important. It's an important question that should be on all of our minds at all all times. One thing that I can say is we're we are very focused on, you know, what we call intelligence for good. We're very focused on ethical uses of AI. You have to be very intentional about how you design your systems, how you train models, how you make sure you protect data in doing that. And. the things that we spent a lot of time thinking about is, you know, we wanna make sure that as we bring AI tools to help further this work and bridge this trust gap that we're talking about, that we do it in a way that make sure that we're preventing the amplification of further societal inequities that have existed. Yes. You know, the automated decision making that can happen in here, if you're not intentional, can have unintended consequences. So we wanna be thoughtful about that. We wanna make sure that AI doesn't mask discriminatory or, you know, that it's under a veneer of objectivity, that sometimes can be the case that truly it's not objective. So we think about those types of things. And as I mentioned, privacy and data is very important. We describe it as, you know, when you think about AI and the amount of data that is out there in the world, it's really a big ocean, a big sea, but we think about your private plunge pool. It's the plunge pool that you have. That's your information, Yes. and we wanna make sure that no one else is in your plunge pool, that you get the best insights around your data, but that that data is not at risk because it's very valuable to your company and very sacred to the work that you all do. So those are just a a couple of examples that we think about Beautiful. every day. Now beautifully spoken. In the in the last year, maybe, we'll close out part one here. If you were if you had to describe the future of employee engagement and purpose, like, in one sentence, which is impossible to do, but I'm gonna ask you to do it. Yeah. What changes most because of AI, and what should never change because of AI? Yeah. That is a great question. I would say the speed that AI brings is one thing that will change. AI is definitely going to raise expectations for speed. There's no doubt about it. I would guess most people on today's call would say the same thing. Personalization and insight, is an expectation, but the heart of engagement has to stay human. The heart of the work that we all do, has to stay human. Trust and inclusion, empathy and transparency. I don't think you can train autonomous agents to have that thing that we have as CSR, that heart that we bring to the work that we do. It can bring us efficiencies and scale, but there will always be the human element, particularly around the heart, the EQ portions of this work that will. be here forever, and I would argue should we should not attempt to change because that is the part that is just unable to be, replicated in any of the autonomous agents that we're seeing out there today. Love the partnership. The partnership. And I think we have another poll. Right? we do have another poll, and this one's really about KPIs. We we wanted to get a little bit of insight from those of you that are with us today on which KPI still dominates your CSR reporting the most today. Are you heavily focused on participation rate, or are the hours volunteered a big portion? Are they the dollars? Is it the outcomes you're providing to community? The number of grants that you all are issuing to your community partners, Is it employee sentiment and belonging signals? Is that an important ingredient? We'd love to know which of these KPIs still dominates the programs that you all lead each day. And we'll give a few, moments here as usual to get the votes in and see what our audience is thinking. Let's see where it's trending here. Participation rate is a little bit ahead. It's been a classic one in our CSR programs for a very long time, the number. or the percentage of people that are participating. I think that's gonna it's gonna bleed here as well. It looks like it we'll give it just one more moment, and then we will close the poll. Alright. I see Andrew pop up, which must mean he is ready to close the poll. So, of those that are voting, 50%, still use, participation. That's that's not surprising, and it does matter. It matters that we know what percentage of our employees are participating. It matters that we know our hours. It's gonna be interesting as we go forward and the topic of belonging and inclusion becomes so. important and more organizations think about how to measure that, how that shows up in our CSR reporting in the in the future. I. fully agree. So So I I think that that that seven that two votes will be more the next time we do this if we get it right. I think you are right. Alright. We're going to, go into another couple of questions on measuring belonging. And, this time, I get to start, so I will ask, Brian the lead question here as we think about factory work with executives that you work with, Brian. Yeah. And the the question on my mind is, what what's one executive habit that quietly erodes trust during AI change? I think it's the the one and it's pervasive, you know, even outside of AI, but definitely accelerated, and it has to do with middle managers. So if if you think about it, the truth is, you know, strategy travels down. We talked about that, but reality travels up. And middle managers and sometimes, you know, they get this the frozen middle are right in the middle of it. But I do think it's what we as executives have done wrong, because we ask our middle managers to cascade information. They don't need to be cascaders. They need to be translators. Number one, they need to make we need to make sure that the message that we're asking them to, you know, translate, not cascade down, they understand it from the beginning and that they have the ability to question, you know, whether it's strategy or tactics, what this means so that they can grasp it so that they can share it to the next level down. And numb that's number one. Number two is we have to give them permission to adapt the message because they know the receivers of that message better than we are. We're not proximate to the very person who needs to absorb it and then take it to that next level. And then number three, once it does get translated down in a way that people understand and information intelligence starts to come back up, we need to have give them the ability to, you know, share with us what they heard and what that translation what came back, and we have to close the loop, with regards to to do that strategy. So those are the three things. I think, you know, the thing you know, that cascade strategy doesn't work. Translation is the key, Dale, in my mind. And if we really want change, we have to lean into empowering the middle layer of managers to be able to do that. And if we do that, that that trust gap, that 83 that 46 gap, that 83% to the 37 will start to close because that middle gap is closing it on our behalf. So that's how I would answer that one. Love that. And that makes sense to you? It does. It makes perfect sense. So I I think I'm also looking at the, comments in, the chat here, and I'm I'm noticing the comment about some of the changes that we're seeing in our programs and how, at least, the one participant is talking about the move from quantity hours of engagement to the quality outcomes that are out there. So those outcomes, that outcome focus totally flips everything on its head because I think that is one too that more that all of us, including our executive leaders, see those outcomes, the easier it is to connect in ways that maybe we didn't around the data that was not as outcome based. Makes sense. So what's one CSR program design choice that quietly excludes people, even when the intentions are good as it relates to measurement? Yeah. It's one that I I think might resonate with a lot of the CSR leaders on here, certainly those of you that lead volunteering events. And it's it's what we describe as, you know, this looking for the ideal participant. You know, sometimes when we're looking for the ideal participant or assuming that everyone can do in person activities or everyone can do daytime or group based volunteering, it quietly excludes frontline workers, for example. It can quietly exclude caregivers. It can quietly exclude remote employees or those with accessibility needs. So that's one. I I don't think it's intentional. I don't think we design our programs to, not be inclusive, but it can quietly erode trust. And that's why I think we have to be very intentional when we design these programs to be inclusive, and it's an opportunity that I know a lot of us are talking about in this moment as we do more virtual and hybrid work together as well to create more inclusive opportunities that don't have that quiet bias within those programs. Fully agree. So one of the ones that I think, I was interested to hear your thought on before we go to, what I think might be our final poll, Brian, is just a center sentence that leaders should start saying to their employees about AI. You know, when you think about we have leaders on today's. call, we have, leaders within organizations that, perhaps those on today's call might interact with. What's a sentence that you would say they should start saying to their employees about AI in the moment that we're in around AI? Yes. And and, you know, I I would say and, hopefully, just it's one sentence here. I'm putting it together in my head. But, I mean, in humility and empathy are are really important at this time. That's what builds trust. So I would say a sentence something like, you know, talk to your team and say, I don't have every answer about how AI will change your work. But I know what you bring to it validating them, and I'm not going to make decisions about your role without you in the conversation. I think that addresses that 38%, but it also shows a humility that we're gonna work together and the person is valued, not just the machine. I'd ask the same review. What would you yeah. That that's a interesting one. What would you say? What sentence, the one that I would love is I I mean, I would love to see leaders across mid level and senior start? levels just doing more around clarity of the strategy. And sometimes it's not. well known. I mean, we're move we're all moving fast. This this AI phenomenon, you know, came on pretty quickly. AI itself has been around for a very long time, but the majority of it came on pretty quickly. So, you know, the one sentence that I would say is, you know, we I would love to see more leaders saying, look. We'll we'll communicate early. We will listen often, and we'll listen to everyone and make sure everyone has a seat at the table and avenues for their voices to be heard, and that we'll make sure that AI strengthens belonging rather than eroding it inside of our organizations. I think that and it was in one of our poll questions earlier, the importance of communication, and it was one that most organizations don't do real well just yet. So that's the one that I would like to see leaders leaning into more. And just being authentic and humble, That's it. Yes. unmute yourself, say something about it even if you don't. have all the answers, and invite voices to the conversation. I love that. I love that. And, again, don't cascade translate. Empower people, but with knowledge, don't throw it on them. I agree. right. Alright. I think our last question, if you'll help us out there, Andrew, is, we would love to know what the most common AI fear is that you all hear, from employees. And we we led with some data on the front end, but that may or may not be the reality that you all are seeing. So, you know, are you hearing about concerns of job loss or role disruption that the policies aren't clear? We talked about training earlier, that training is, an area of deficiency. There could be bias in the programs. We'd love to. know what you see as the most common AI fear that you hear amongst either employees that may be in your organization or your peers across the organizations that you all represent. It looks like the votes are climbing here. Alright. Role disruption. Yep. And job loss. That and that that parallels the great place to work AI insight as well. Yeah, Andrew. I think that, yeah, that's pretty definitive, the top two there. Agreed. I think things are slowing down, but you are correct. Yeah. Job loss and role disruption seems to be what is top of mind for sure. So I'm gonna go ahead and close that one. Not surprising to see that that, is the case. And, obviously, we have much work to do in those areas if we desire to create a sense of belonging as we move forward. Well, I am mindful, you all, that, we are a couple of minutes away from the end of our time together, but we did want to, end with one more poll for this group. And just from a q and a standpoint, offer to, address any questions that you all may have before we give you an opportunity to weigh in if you want more information on anything that we talked about. Andrew, do we have any, questions perhaps from the group? We do. So I'm gonna pop in with some just quick questions before we launch that last poll. The first question actually, has appeared in our chat and it it's, someone asking, have you seen any examples of volunteer programs that have leveraged AI learning and development as an actual activity, for example, mentoring or upskilling? What a great question, and what a great opportunity to, lend one skills in this area. The the short answer is yes. We're starting to see companies that have very high proficiencies, taking those out. And I would say most specifically to nonprofits. What we're seeing right now is the nonprofit ecosystem is really struggling to keep pace with AI. They don't have big learning and development teams. They're not technical in nature. So we're starting to see some really good examples of organizations, technology companies, but not always technology companies, that have internal skills around large language models on how to build and deploy agentic AI agents, taking those skills to, for example, nonprofits. We're also seeing some great examples of youth mentoring because we wanna make sure that younger populations in all corners of our communities are participating and have the opportunity. I think that's one we'll make note of there. Perhaps in a future webinar, we could share some examples of those, but it's such a great example of an emerging skill that, so many need that we can pair together. Let's do a deal here. We have our Belonging Intelligence AI impact network microlearning platform. Let's do something together focused on that, Dale. I think that would be a great next step for us to discuss as well. Would love that. Alright, gentlemen. And just one last quick question. You both spoke a bit about executive leadership and things executives should stop start doing or stop doing as we think about trust in AI. What about for folks in this audience? As they sort of leave this conversation today, what's sort of one piece of advice as they start to dig into this back at their desks that you would give them as in on this one. I so so think we use the word executive a lot because those folks are and and we are dictating strategy. Everything we said and the suggestions we have should should be the same for every individual. No matter because you're a leader, whether you have formal leadership or not, treating people with empathy, leaning into human difference, leaning into belonging, all of those things are are the exact same instructions. Do not cascade to people. Try to translate. Meet people where they are. Address their fears, do not lie to them, and be, you know, humble, and have humility and empathy. I would say do those same exact things. If everyone's doing it, then the company is gonna be better for it. We would say you do. Yeah. I would say plus one to that. And and the one thing that I would say is is be curious. One habit that I've started doing personally and I encourage everyone on my, organization to do is I start the day by reading, four or five daily newsletters on what's happening within AI. I end the day by just making sure that I am up to speed. I'm curious about what's going on. I'm keeping pace with it. Some of it's noise, but you make sure then that it doesn't pass you by. So that's not just for those that are the top leadership of companies. That's for all of us to do so that we can understand how we can use this impactful technology to further our work. Well, That's correct. are at time, so I believe the last one that we will ask you all just to consider is a poll that, you know, we just invite you when you think about any of the questions that you see here that you might want to learn more about. If you wanna talk through how AI is impacting culture from a metric standpoint, if you wanna learn how other organizations are making belonging measurable, this is an area where we could have some follow-up conversation on how you add this as a measurable ingredient to your CSR activities, pressure test, how it shows up in the engagement data, any of the areas that you see here that you're interested in. Please just, feel free to let us know. And we have the ability on the back end to make sure that, either are your calls from Blackbaud or Belonging Intelligence, depending on what your need is, reaches out to you. But we wanna certainly thank you all for your interest in this topic. We wanna, again, thank you for the work that you all are doing to make our community stronger, to make our workplaces, Replace workplaces that. Replace and have engaged employees. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and we look forward to doing more of these in the future. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day. Thank you, everyone. It's a pleasure. Privilege.