Carrie Fox
Hi, I’m Carrie Fox, and welcome back to Mission Forward. This week I am reflecting on my conversation with Ike Anand.

Ike is the president and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He spent two decades in technology, much of it at Expedia, before joining ALSAC, and he stepped into the CEO seat about a year ago, at exactly the moment that every mission-driven organization was trying to figure out what artificial intelligence would mean for them.

If you haven’t heard our full conversation yet, go back and listen. Ike thinks about trust and technology with a rare kind of clarity, and there’s a lot in there for any of us leading through this moment.

Here are my three takeaways.

First, the boldest decision you can make about AI is deciding where you won’t use it. Ike put it in three boxes for me. One, AI is actually eroding people’s trust in institutions. They no longer know what’s real. Two, for ALSAC, trust is currency. It’s the whole business. And three, a technology that transformative is not one you can afford to ignore. All three are true. So the question was never if they would use AI, but how.

And here’s what struck me. Inside the organization, they’ve gone almost all in. Near-total staff adoption, tools, agents running around the clock, but they have drawn bright, deliberate lines around donor conversations, advertising, and storytelling. No AI there. Because that’s where authenticity lives at ALSAC. And authenticity is exactly what trust is built on.

And so that’s their AI governance, at least the basis of it. Knowing the difference between the sacred and the everyday uses of AI, how we use it, how we don’t. So for those of you standing at that same edge, trying to decide what level of technology is right for you, start by naming the places where the human must stay visible.

Second, adoption isn’t a technology problem. Ike says it’s a trust problem. So near-total adoption of AI doesn’t come from sending out a memo. It comes from education and training before anyone even had access to a tool. It comes from understanding what’s safe, how to use the tool, how not to use the tool, and being wise in making those decisions.

Ike has some real clear principles that help make the adoption of AI real. One, he calls this freedom within a framework. You define the guardrails, then you let people loose inside of them. The other he borrowed from Reed Hastings. Lead with context, not control. Give people the whole picture, not just the narrow slice of their job, and they’ll do their work better than any job description could ask them to.

Fear, as he said, kills adoption faster than any flawed tool ever will. So if your people are anxious about the moment, the work in front of you, it’s not a rollout plan, it’s not a memo, it’s trust building, working together to learn and adopt the technology.

And finally, stop fighting for a bigger slice. Go build a bigger pie. Ike doesn’t really see competitors for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, or for ALSAC for that matter. He sees sister organizations, and a philanthropy sector that’s been stuck at about two percent of GDP for a long time. His bet is that we’re at the cusp of breaking that ceiling, and technology is the lever. It opens new doors, it reaches new people who simply weren’t listening or engaging before, and it amplifies impact.

The St. Jude Global Alliance now connects hundreds of institutions across dozens of countries. They share research and training and even free medicine. You bring those two together and the whole pie grows, as he says. That’s an abundance mindset that our sector needs.

So the question I would leave you with after listening and learning from Ike is, where are you competing for scarcity when you could be growing the whole thing?

That is my reflection for this week, my friends. What I keep coming back to is something that Ike said about the brand he carries, that his job is to hold it for a season and hand it off in good condition to whoever comes next. I really love that. It reminded me of my own North Star. Leave it better than you found it. That’s our whole job, isn’t it?

I’m so grateful to Ike for sharing his time and his wisdom with us. Go back and listen to this episode and take a closer look at the work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the St. Jude Global Alliance. I’ll have some links in the show notes. And until next time, keep your mission moving forward, and thanks for tuning in.