By Martin Allen Morales, chief executive, Institute of Imagination
AI has become an important tool in my leadership, not because I am chasing efficiency or shiny new tools, but because I am trying to remain imaginative and personally balanced in a world that keeps accelerating. People often assume that when a charity CEO uses AI it is for slick dashboards or automation. For me it is much more personal. AI helps me finding clarity among the noise. It helps me hold complexity when there’s a pressure point. It gives me and my team space to create. It supports me to stay rooted when the charity sector around me is stretched to its limits.
At the Institute of Imagination we have grown our play based STEAM and social emotional learning programmes to more than one hundred thousand children over many years. That growth has been demanding. It has come at the same time as rising pressure on families, schools and communities, not just children. To lead through that kind of turbulence I need clarity. AI helps me think through scenarios when demand suddenly increases. It helps me distil long evaluation reports into the single question that matters. Such as “are we truly reaching the children who need us most?”. Before one trustee meeting AI helped me compare two strategic pathways we were considering. It spotted something I had missed. A rapid scale up of our model could unintentionally weaken our impact goals unless we redesigned the way children accessed our programmes. That one insight reshaped our longer-term direction.
Inside the organisation, AI has helped me create a culture that protects people rather than pushing them harder. When I joined the charity, staff retention was around fifty per cent. Within two years, it rose to ninety-five per cent. That shift happened because we reshaped culture from the inside out. AI played a small but meaningful part. In brainstorms, it helped create reflective practice tools which made it easier for staff to express what they were experiencing. It supported neurodiverse colleagues by giving us ways to design communication that worked for different thinking styles. It reduced administrative weight during periods of growth so the team could focus on imagination and relationships rather than firefighting. I want to take this even further and explore AI supported coaching tools so staff can rehearse difficult conversations and feel more confident in their leadership.
AI has also helped me build partnerships and fundraising relationships more deeply and more quickly. In the last few years, we’ve secured a couple of large unrestricted grants. We built new earned income streams. We strengthened partnerships with various partners such as LEGO, Save The Children and CHANEL. AI helped me and our team prepare for these conversations by mapping where our work aligned with the priorities of each partner. AI does not win partnerships. It accelerates genuine understanding, which is the foundation of trust.
Governance has also benefited. Trustees need clarity, and they need accountability. AI helps me transform large volumes of information into accessible words. It helps me review policy updates from the Charity Commission or global research on digital rights. It supports my preparation for crisis scenarios so trustees can make decisions with a full view of the risks. Recently, AI helped me model the implications of several strategy options. One option looked financially efficient until the model revealed the impact it would have on staff wellbeing and programme consistency. That insight changed our recommendation.
In our delivery and safeguarding work, AI has become a quiet but important ally. Working with children carries a deep responsibility. I’ve used AI to review safeguarding cases and test scenarios. I use it to check our digital tools for accessibility issues or unintended bias. But of course, this is alongside consultation from experts, our leads, and deeper research and conversation. It helps me summarise global research quickly so we remain ahead of emerging risks. When our programmes grow in scale, or decrease, AI is invaluable in helping us plan across teams without adding pressure. I am excited about exploring how AI could help us spot early signs that a child or family might be disengaging so we can intervene with care and dignity.
Impact and storytelling are areas where AI has helped me find coherence. Impact work is full of complexity and emotion. AI helps me pull together evidence and stories in a way that makes sense to funders, policy makers, partners and our own teams. When I spoke at the European Commission about equitable STEAM education AI helped me synthesise many years of insights into a message that was clear enough to resonate and strong enough to hopefully influence. AI did not write my speech. It helped me find the shape of the argument that needed to be made.
In my advocacy work AI has helped me act quickly without losing nuance. Whether I am shaping policy positions around play or responding to sudden shifts in national debates or drafting open letters like the one that brought together one hundred creative leaders to call for a National Play Strategy, AI helps me test arguments from different perspectives and avoid blind spots. It speeds up preparation so I have more time to think about what I actually want to say.
There is also a growing list of things I want to explore. I want to use AI to understand community voice at a deeper and more systemic level. I want to create AI-powered tools that test our programmes for bias. I want children to help design ethical AI principles through play. I want to explore predictive models that identify safeguarding pressure points before they escalate. I want tools that help us design creative and resilient funding structures. AI is not a distraction from the mission. It is a new way of imagining how our mission could evolve.
It also feels important for me to say that I used AI to help write this article. I asked it to process some of my thinking and to organise ideas that were scattered across conversations, notebooks, and memories. It offered a few turns of phrase and some structural guidance. But the voice is mine. The judgment is mine. The lived experience is mine. I went through every line. I edited and corrected anything that did not sound like me. I checked every fact whether it came from me or from AI. I rewrote entire sections to make sure the emotional truth was truly mine and hopefully can connect to yours. AI helped with structure but it did not create the story. It simply gave me enough processing power, to write something I am keen to share.
AI is a powerful and essential tool for any charity CEO. And I’m proud to be one. It sits at the edges of my leadership but my voice, and my humanity remains firmly at the centre of all I write and I offer.