Values-based organizations face a different agent question: impact instead of productivity. Four fields — access, impact measurement, internal work, ethics competence — open possibilities without diluting the organization's values.

The association, the foundation, the federation

Essay #006 · 2026 · Reading time 6 min · Field: AI Strategy · Market: Sport / NGO

A foundation director I have known for a while recently asked me a question that got me thinking. She said: everything written about AI in a business context is about productivity. About how work gets faster, how costs drop, how margins grow. But what about us? What about the organizations whose reason for being is not margin, but impact?

The question has two layers. On the surface, it asks: are there sensible agent uses for values-based organizations too? Underneath, it asks something deeper: does the age of agents change the essence of what a values-based organization actually is?

This essay takes the second question seriously.

The misunderstanding

The first reflex in most NGO, foundation, and federation leaderships is: “This is not for us.” The reasoning: resource constraints, data protection, skepticism toward technology, concern that AI displaces human attention. Each of these concerns has a true core. But the reflex itself is a misunderstanding.

The misunderstanding consists in “AI” being understood as a technology whose use is synonymous with use in companies. It is not. The technology is the same. The question of what to do with it is not.

In companies, the core question is: how do we create more value with less effort? In values-based organizations, the core question is: how do we create more impact with the same effort? The difference sounds semantic. It is structural.

Four fields in which agents will change values-based organizations

I see four fields in which agentic work is especially relevant for values-based organizations. Not every field matters equally for every organization. But all four will become a topic in the coming years for every organization with more than twenty full-time staff.

First field: access to people. Many values-based organizations fail not from a lack of topics but from a lack of reach. A support association for rare diseases often reaches the people who need its help only by coincidence. A foundation serving disadvantaged groups often reaches only fragments of the voices it wants to strengthen. Agents can do something here that was previously possible only with large budgets: identify target groups, address them individually, find culturally fitting communication. A small foundation can generate a reach that used to be reserved for large organizations.

Second field: impact measurement. The question “What impact do we actually have?” is often painful in values-based organizations because the answer is hard to give. Impact is diffuse, slow, qualitative. Agents can help collect and condense data that used to be too expensive to gather: participant trajectories, interview analyses, media resonance, self-efficacy indicators. That does not replace the qualitative work. But it adds a layer that was missing before due to capacity constraints.

Third field: internal work. As in companies, values-based organizations also have administrative work that binds people who would rather be doing substantive work. Grant applications, reports, communication with funders, documentation. Agents can take on part of this work and thereby free up capacity. The same questions apply as in companies — only the goal is no longer margin, but more time for substantive work.

Fourth field: ethics competence. The field in which values-based organizations are potentially ahead of the economy — and should be. When agents make decisions that affect people, ethical questions arise that commercial organizations often reframe away quickly. Values-based organizations are qualified not to reframe them away. They can become a voice in societal debates that they did not have before. Those who position themselves early in this role do not only gain relevance — they shape discourse that would otherwise be shaped by others.

The deeper question

Beneath the four fields lies a deeper question, which is what the foundation director was really getting at.

Values-based organizations have historically grown as a counterweight to economic logic. They stand for things that cannot be translated into market prices — dignity, participation, memory, engagement, justice. Agentic systems in their current form, however, are tools of economic logic — developed to enable efficiency and scaling. Does that go together?

The answer is not: it does not. The answer is: it depends on who in the values-based organization takes responsibility for the deployment. Those who introduce agentic systems without placing their own values at the center will dilute those values. Those who introduce them and make the values the guiding thread of deployment can achieve the opposite: an organization that becomes clearer in what it is.

Doing so requires the same entrepreneurial posture that the first five essays of this archive described: that the decision-maker herself gets moving. A foundation director who relies on her IT department will not be the one who leads her organization through this change with its values intact. A federation leadership that relies on an external advisor will not know which of its principles it is currently giving away.

The question “Does AI belong to us?” is therefore wrongly posed. The right question is: “How does our organization change when we use AI — and do we want that change?” That question must be answered. Not to IT, not to advisors. To the people for whose sake the organization exists.

What arocon offers values-based organizations

arocon works with values-based organizations on similar terms as with companies — with two differences.

First: two engagements per year at reduced rates or pro bono, selected by relevance and fit. That is not charity. It is a values position.

Second: the questions we discuss are usually different. Less margin, more impact. Less scaling, more clarity. But the methodological posture is the same: that the leadership can decide sovereignly what happens in its organization, and why.

The sports federations, foundations, and social associations I will accompany in the coming years will become architects in their own way. Not architects of growth — architects of impact.

— Axel Roth