CiviAI: Exploring the Future of AI in CiviPlus
First off a little disclaimer: CiviAI is far from production ready yet! We're working hard to develop this foundation and looking to share our work via our github in due course. If you'd like to collaborate or contribute to the work then please do get in touch with us!
Intentional AI implementation
Unless you've been living under a (rather large) rock you may have noticed that AI is everywhere right now. Every day seems to bring a new tool or breakthrough about how AI will change the way we work.
At Compuco (the team behind CiviPlus) over the past few years we've been exploring how AI could meaningfully and safely be integrated with CiviCRM.
We’re extremely excited about how AI could help nonprofits to achieve their missions. From supporting organisations to communicate their messages, streamlining their processes to financial reporting, we believe AI can transform the sector, very much for the better.
Whilst the use cases for AI in CRM are wide ranging, implementing AI in a safe and reliable way is challenging. AI has a tendency to make mistakes (“hullucinate”) and especially in the case of generative AI, can respond in unpredictable ways. As such any discussion about integration should also be had in conjunction with considering the implications for privacy, security and transparency as well as the potential impact on people and processes.
Designing AI for non-profits therefore needs to be done in a considered and intentional way. That's why we think it’s important to explore, iterate and gather feedback as we implement this capability in our ecosystem.
Introducing CiviAI
With all this in mind, we’re pleased to be sharing our initial explorations on a new extension we are developing for the community which, for now, we are calling “CiviAI”, for feedback.
The plan is for CiviAI to work in 2 meaningful and useful ways:
AI Assistant
An integrated, context-aware chatbot who can support you with searching, finding answers to questions, performing actions such as creating records as well as analytics and reporting, all directly from within CiviCRM. We hope the AI assistant will help users find information faster and work more efficiently.
AI Smart Fields
Smart fields on the other hand, will allow users to set up automations that modify data held within your CRM, allowing users to automatically generate summaries, aggregate data and update field values. You set up a rule as part of a custom field, and the field will be populated automatically.
We’ve been testing these tools internally for a little while now and whilst they are not quite ready for release we’re excited to finally be in a position to show our early work. Please find a link below to a short webinar where we're pleased to share these ideas for feedback:
Looking ahead
As with everything we've built for CiviCRM over the years, CiviAI is being developed as extensions and underlying tooling we plan to share with the community in the usual way. (And if you are interested you can find all our other extensions on our github repository here: github.com/compucorp).
CiviAI is certainly not production ready yet - but in the last few months we’ve seen real leaps in the quality and reliability of AI tools and we hope to be able to develop this foundation with suitable guard rails to make this useful and safe. This has given us confidence that now is the right time to start discussions and gather feedback on the route ahead.
At CiviPlus, we believe that adopting AI should never mean sacrificing control, trust, or good governance. That's why our approach to AI is centred around keeping humans in the loop, giving organisations control over how AI is used, and focusing on practical applications that genuinely help teams work more effectively.
As we continue this journey, feedback from clients, partners, and the wider CiviCRM community will play an important role in shaping what comes next. We're excited to explore the possibilities together and ensure that any future AI capabilities are developed in a way that is responsible, practical, and aligned with the needs of the organisations we serve.
We're just at the beginning of that journey, and we're excited to explore what's possible together.
Written by a human with a little help from Claude 😉
