Nonprofit roots.
AI specialists.
A team of sector practitioners, designers and AI builders — on a mission to bring AI fluency to the people doing the work that matters, at the scale this moment demands.
AI for the people at the
heart of social impact.
This sector is full of extraordinary people. Fundraisers holding five jobs at once. Campaigners navigating impossible politics. Program leads making miracles happen with stretched budgets and limited resources. Leaders facing yet another tidal wave of change and uncertainty. People who do this work because it matters, and keep showing up day after day.
We built PLAI for them.
A team of AI geeks, facilitators, fundraisers, builders, and strategists.
Kaz McGrath
Stephen Silveira
Amber Watson-Lee
Esther Kwaku
Jason Teeters
Laura McGrath
It started at midnight in Indonesia.
I spent over a decade in the sector before PLAI — building fundraising campaigns, leading global teams, figuring out how to make tiny budgets go as far as possible, and holding the weight of what this work asks of people.
It's a privilege and a joy to do this work. But I'd be lying if I said it hadn't left me burnt out and wishing there was a better way.
So in January 2022, when I first tried an early preview of a GenAI tool, I was floored. Excitement. Hope. Is this real?
It was midnight for me in Indonesia, midday for my colleague Josefina and her husband Roy in Winnipeg. We were working on supporter journeys for fundraising teams across Asia. Roy overheard our meeting and said: "Can I show you how you could do that with AI?"
He worked deep in AI — a genuine expert. He showed us how to use a conversational tool he'd built called Copybee to create personas from complex datasets, run deep research on country-specific fundraising trends, and mock up email campaigns and proposition tests in minutes.
I spent every waking minute of the next two weeks trying Copybee for every use case I could imagine. I was doing things I would've paid a consultant $20K for. My imagination went wild.
At the end of those two weeks, I decided to start PLAI. Ten months before ChatGPT was released.
I've spent the four years since building ways to help the sector learn AI, spark possibilities, and use it in ways that serve them, their missions, and the communities they work with.