I know, I know…You’re barely able to keep up with the implementations of AI at your organization and now you’re being asked what value is it resulting in for the org.

If you’re leading a faith-based nonprofit, a few uncomfortable AI questions may be getting harder to avoid – if you haven’t heard them, they are coming:

“How do we even begin measuring – or attributing – ROI and Kingdom impact from AI?”

“Our board is asking what we’re getting from our AI investment, but we can barely keep up with implementation.”

“We’re spending more on AI every quarter…but are we actually creating more ministry capacity, or just consuming more technology?”

These are becoming financial stewardship questions, not technology questions.

AI is creating a new operating expense across ministries: subscriptions, APIs, agents, platforms, and token consumption. Yet knowing what we spent tells us very little about what the investment produced.

Boards will increasingly want to understand whether AI is returning hours to frontline ministry, reducing administrative burden, equipping more leaders, increasing donor engagement, accelerating content and translation, or creating measurable financial value. And I believe foundations funding technology capacity and digital transformation will increasingly ask the same question:

What did our investment make possible?

That requires moving beyond AI activity reports toward:

Investment to Capacity to Outcome to Kingdom Impact

The challenge is that most ministries are implementing AI faster than they’re building the systems to measure it. They can barely track their outcomes and tie it to gain productivity.

So I created a simple AI Stewardship & ROI Calculator as a starting point for CEOs, boards, finance teams, and foundation leaders.

It’s not intended to put a dollar value on ministry. It’s intended to help us become better stewards of the dollars being invested in technology for ministry.

I’m making the Excel tool available as a free download

Tokens tell us what we consumed but stewardship asks what the investment produced.

Stewart Severino