How Rotary Is — and Is Not — Preparing for the AI Era

by Alberto Palombo

Bill Gates recently warned that AI could become either “the greatest equalizer ever invented” or an extraordinary source of injustice. His concern is that institutions and communities are not preparing adequately for the transition. The benefits of AI will not be distributed fairly by accident.

This warning should matter greatly to Rotary.

Rotary has taken useful first steps. Its guidance asks members to verify AI-generated information, consider bias, protect confidential data, and preserve human responsibility. But these safeguards do not yet amount to an institutional strategy.

Much of the current approach remains defensive: do not disclose sensitive information, do not trust AI without verification, and do not replace human judgment. All are valid cautions. But they say little about how Rotary will responsibly use AI to increase the impact of its service.

This is particularly relevant to The Rotary Foundation Cadre of Technical Advisers. We must consider these questions with our feet firmly on the ground. Our responsibility is to help Rotary projects achieve the greatest possible impact and create lasting change. AI can help us organize evidence, challenge assumptions, strengthen project design, improve indicators, identify risks, and support monitoring and learning.

We cannot remain passive before guidance that might be interpreted simply as: “Do not use AI because it is dangerous and sensitive information could be exposed.”

The risks are real—but is keeping AI at arm’s length how other major service and development organizations are responding? Can organizations serving communities afford to stay behind while the rest of the world explores how AI can improve health, education, livelihoods, sustainability, and humanitarian action?

Protecting information is not a new responsibility. Rotary handled personal, financial, donor, and beneficiary data before generative AI existed. We developed procedures, access controls, and ethical standards. We must now adapt those protections to this new environment—not allow risk to become an excuse for institutional paralysis.

Rotary should seriously revisit its AI guidelines, not to weaken safeguards, but to put service to communities first. The guidance should clearly distinguish between unsafe disclosure and responsible use, and between replacing human judgment and strengthening it.

Rotary does not need to become a technology organization. But it must become an AI-ready service organization: careful with data, ambitious about learning, grounded in evidence, inclusive in deployment, and unmistakably human in its decisions.

The real question is not whether Rotarians should use AI. It is whether Rotary will help shape an equitable AI transition—or respond only after its consequences have reached the communities we serve.

The time to prepare is now.

Based on Bill Gates’s recent essay: https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai-work-for-everyone/reader/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make