Mission-Driven AI Leadership: Balancing Scale, Efficiency, and Social Work Values

In this online course you will learn:

Social work leaders are increasingly making decisions about AI and automation that will shape not only how their organizations operate, but how they serve people, allocate resources, and uphold their mission. AI can increase organizational capacity, reduce administrative burden, personalize experiences, and allow services and resources to reach larger populations. However, the most efficient or scalable option is not inherently the best management decision for a mission-driven organization.

This session examines a central question for contemporary social work management: How can leaders leverage AI and technology to expand organizational impact while ensuring that decisions remain grounded in social work values?

The presenters bring complementary social work and business backgrounds to this question. Drawing on lessons from the growth of Agents of Change, a technology-enabled social work education organization, they will examine real organizational decisions involving AI, automation, scale, sustainability, and human engagement. These experiences will serve as case examples allowing participants to translate lessons to a variety of different sectors, including healthcare, educational, nonprofit, public-sector, and social-impact organizations.

Participants will examine key leadership tensions, including when AI should automate, augment, or assist; and how leaders can scale while protecting equity, quality, accountability, human connection, and mission.

The session will introduce the “VALUES” framework:

V — Values & Mission: Does this use of technology advance our mission and align with the values that guide our organization?

A — Access & Equity: Who benefits, who may be excluded, and could this technology reduce or deepen existing disparities?

L — Lived Experience & Human Connection: How will this affect the people we serve and employ, and what relationships, voice, choice, or human interaction need to be protected?

U — Utility & Organizational Value: Does it meaningfully improve quality, capacity, responsiveness, sustainability, or efficiency and is AI actually the right tool for the problem?

E — Ethics, Risk & Accountability: What could go wrong, what safeguards are needed, and who remains accountable for the outcomes?

S — Stewardship & Scale: If the technology creates value, how can we implement and scale it responsibly while continuing to evaluate its impact?

Participants will apply the framework to an organizational AI scenario and identify one technology, AI, or automation decision within their own setting that could benefit from more deliberate consideration. 

The session will emphasize that effective AI leadership does not require social work managers to become expert technologists. It requires them to develop the leadership capacity to ask better questions, integrate business and social work perspectives, establish appropriate safeguards, and determine how emerging technologies can advance organizational mission without allowing efficiency or scale to become ends in themselves.