The Curve: Humans in the lead; making AI useful in your everyday work

The Curve, led by Third Sector Lab, offers free digital skills training.

AI is already finding its way into everyday charity work, from drafting and research, to analysing information, preparing reports and reducing admin.  But moving from occasional experimentation to genuinely useful, responsible use is much harder than simply learning a few prompts.

In this practical workshop, we’ll look at how to identify the right work for AI, where it can save time or improve quality, and where it may not be appropriate at all.  We’ll explore how to get better results by giving AI the right context, source material and constraints, rather than relying on prompt tricks or constantly chasing new tools.

We’ll also look beyond individual prompts and think about how AI can fit into real workflows.  You’ll consider which parts of a process AI might support, where human judgement, relationships and accountability need to remain firmly in the lead, and how the level of risk changes depending on the task and the information involved.

The session will introduce simple, practical approaches you can reuse in your own organisation, including:

• Identifying work that AI could reduce, improve or enable
• deciding whether an AI use is relatively low risk or needs much stronger safeguards
• using Task> Context> Sources> Constraints> Output to get more useful results
• moving from one-off prompts to thinking about whole workflows
• deciding what genuinely requires human judgement and responsibility
• designing small, safe AI experiments and deciding how you will measure whether they actually work

There will be plenty of practical examples and time to apply the ideas to your own work.  You’ll leave with at least one specific AI experiment you can try in your organisation, along with a clearer way to judge where AI is useful, where caution is needed, and what humans remain responsible for.

This workshop is suitable for: charity staff at any stage of AI adoption, from people who have only experimented with tools like Chat GPT or Copilot, through to those beginning to think about how AI can be embedded more deliberately across their organisation.

No technical knowledge is required.

More about Ross McCulloch

Ross is Director of Third Sector Lab, where he works with charities and public services to make better use of digital, data and AI, and has led digital leadership and skills programmes across Scotland’s third sector for more than a decade.

The Curve, led by Third Sector Lab, offers free digital training for the third sector. These online workshops aim to build knowledge around best digital practices, raise awareness of digital tools and increase impact with digital. Sessions are open to anyone working or volunteering with a third sector organisation in the UK.

The ALLIANCE are proud sponsors of The Curve.

To register for this session, please visit The Curve event page.

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