ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the Altruist League, a Geneva-based philanthropic advisory firm, leveraged artificial intelligence to match donors focused on systemic change with grassroots organizations and movements worldwide. The League began by building a database of tens of thousands of such groups globally, with analysts collecting extensive data on each. To scale analysis, the team developed an AI system for donor-partner matching, achieving over 90% accuracy. The League also created an index of top-performing groups for passive investment. The chapter briefly outlines the League’s excursion into sustainable for-profit investing and ESG analysis, which for a few years was the primary source of revenue for the business. The League recently pivoted to developing large language models trained on its data, allowing automated summarization and donor advice generation. Techniques like retrieval-augmented generation were used, significantly augmenting the capacities of human analysts. The chapter analyzes trends in the sector, arguing that AI will become essential but must remain human-centric. It emphasizes the need for collaboration, transparency, and ethics. The League’s overarching aim is to democratize philanthropy by empowering small niche organizations through technology while centering on trust-based relationships. The chapter concludes by analyzing the League’s technological tools and predicting ten trends for the intersection of AI, philanthropy, and systemic change.
