M.A.I. Consulting
For foundations, donors and development agencies

You are asking grantees about AI. Almost nobody is helping them answer.

Your portfolio is already using AI on data you fund. We assess it, write the rules, train the teams, and hand you one report on where the whole cohort stands — for less than funding it organisation by organisation.

The position you are in

An asymmetry your own sector has measured.

In September 2025 the Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed 451 nonprofit leaders and 215 foundation leaders. Three of its findings sit uncomfortably together.

81%

of foundations report using AI internally

Though only about 4% describe that use as systematic across the organisation.

11%

provide AI implementation support to nonprofits

The capability is being built inside foundations and not passed down to the organisations delivering the work.

<20%

of nonprofits say a funder has discussed AI with them

Meanwhile AI questions are starting to appear in due diligence packs.

Stated plainly: the sector is beginning to assess grantees on a capability it has not offered to help them build. That is a fair thing to fix, and it is also a risk sitting inside your portfolio rather than inside your office — which is the harder place to see it.
Eight questions

Answer these about your portfolio before funding anything.

If you can answer all eight, you do not need us. If you cannot answer the first three, that is the programme — and the first one costs about four weeks to close.

1
Activity

How many of your grantees use AI in programme delivery?

Not how many report it — how many actually do. In the wider workforce roughly two-thirds have used AI at work believing it was not permitted, so self-reporting understates it everywhere it has been measured.

2
Exposure

Which of them put beneficiary data into tools nobody has reviewed?

Around 88% of professionals have put work information into public chatbots, a third of them customer or beneficiary records. In your portfolio that data belongs to people your funding exists to protect.

3
Governance

How many have a written AI policy?

Sector-wide the figure is about one in three, and most of those are prohibition lists rather than usable rules. You can ask this question of your portfolio today and the answer takes a week to gather.

4
Due diligence

Can your grantees answer the AI questions you are starting to ask?

Foundations are adding AI governance questions to due diligence. If a grantee cannot answer, you learn nothing about their risk — only about their paperwork.

5
Concentration

Where in the portfolio would an incident hurt you most?

Not evenly distributed. It sits wherever case data, health data or protection data meets a small organisation with no IT function. That is a short list and it is knowable.

6
Compliance

Which grantees are in scope for EU AI Act Article 4 through work you fund?

Since 2 February 2025 organisations deploying AI in the EU must ensure demonstrable AI literacy proportionate to role, contractors included. Funding EU-facing activity can put that obligation inside your portfolio.

7
Support

What have you funded so far to close the gap?

The honest sector answer is close to nothing: 81% of foundations report using AI internally, about 11% provide implementation support to nonprofits, and fewer than 20% of nonprofits say a funder has even discussed it with them.

8
Measurement

If you funded something, how would you know it worked?

Attendance is not evidence. A scored baseline and a re-score are, and they cost almost nothing extra once the assessment is running across the cohort.

Three ways to fund this

Portfolio programmes.

Fixed price, fixed scope. Prices are for nonprofit and foundation clients and exclude VAT and travel.

Portfolio Baseline

Up to 15 grantees · find out where you stand
from CHF 12,000fixed price, fixed scope
  • Readiness assessment run across the cohort
  • A 45-minute debrief for each grantee
  • One portfolio report to you: where the cohort sits, which organisations are most exposed, and what to fund first
  • Anonymised or attributed, your choice — agreed with grantees up front
About 4 weeks
Ask about Baseline

Grantee Drawdown Fund

Any number · grantees choose their own timing
from CHF 30,00015% below list, 12-month drawdown
  • You pre-fund a block of individual engagements
  • Grantees draw down Foundation or Adoption packages when they are ready
  • Quarterly report to you on what has been drawn and what was found
  • Unused balance rolls or refunds — agreed at contract
12 months
Ask about the Fund
Why fund it as a cohort

The same work, bought twelve times, costs four and a half times more.

Twelve grantees

Twelve separate Adoption engagements — 12 × CHF 19,500CHF 234,000
One Portfolio Programme covering the same twelveCHF 52,000
The saving is not a discount. Three things are genuinely shared rather than repeated: the assessment infrastructure already exists, one policy template is adapted twelve times instead of twelve policies being written, and one cohort session replaces twelve organisation-wide sessions.

What the cohort version is not

It is a shared spine with per-organisation adaptation. Each grantee gets its own policy and its own cheatsheet, built on its own work — but it does not get four separate department labs the way a standalone Adoption engagement does.

For most grantees under 100 staff that is the right trade, because the binding constraint is having any approved rules and one usable page, not having four of them.

Where a grantee is larger or carries unusual risk — health data, protection casework, multi-country operations — we will say so in the Baseline report and recommend a standalone engagement for that organisation rather than stretching the cohort format over it.

What each grantee ends up holding

Artefacts they own, not attendance they forget.

A scored baseline

Ten dimensions covering fluency, data protection, governance, workforce impact, internal politics and psychological safety — mapped to ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and EU AI Act Article 4.

Their own approved policy

Permissions first, not prohibitions: permitted uses by role, red lines, a data classification table, disclosure rules and an escalation path.

One page per organisation

Built from their real tasks. See a sample.

An evidence file

Policy, tool inventory, attendance record and two scores — the file a regulator, an auditor or their next funder asks to see.

See the underlying services and individual prices

Where this does not fit

Four situations where we would tell you not to buy it.

One thing worth saying openly. This practice is young and its client list is short. What you can inspect before committing is unusually complete: the assessment instrument is public and free to run, the framework is published, a full sample deliverable is on the site, and every price is listed. Run the assessment on one grantee this week and judge the instrument on its output.

Start with one grantee, or with the eight questions.

Send the assessment to a single grantee and see what comes back. Or book thirty minutes and we will work through the eight questions against your actual portfolio.