How will AI change philanthropy? The future of grantmaking
The last grant application
By Wesley Stevens, Founder of Quillify. October 3, 2026.
How will AI change philanthropy?
AI will end the grant application. Today it makes applying faster. Within a few steps, funders will find organizations themselves, a living record of each organization's work will replace the proposal, and money will move when evidence of need meets a funder's stated intent.
The application was a workaround
In our conversations with customers, a single foundation proposal takes between 50 and 400 hours. Roughly seven in ten private foundations say on their own tax returns that they will never read it, because they only fund organizations they pick themselves. The ones that do read it ask for the same story in a different format, on a different deadline, and then ask for it again in a report.
The grant application was built for a world where reading was expensive. A foundation with three staff could not study ten thousand organizations, so it asked them to come forward, one form at a time. Almost everything people find painful about grants follows from that one constraint.
Most talk about AI in philanthropy stops at the obvious step: write the proposal faster. That is real and it is useful. It is also the first of five steps, and the fifth looks nothing like the first.
Five steps
Step one: faster applications. The same process, done in a fraction of the time. Research, eligibility checks and first drafts take hours instead of weeks. This is where most of the sector is now.
Step two: one application, many funders. When adapting a document costs minutes, bespoke formats lose their reason to exist. An organization describes its work once and every funder reads it in the shape it prefers. Will there ever be one grant application?
Step three: funders find you. When a foundation can read every public filing, report and outcome in its field each week, discovery reverses. The funder builds its own shortlist, and the open call becomes the exception. How foundations will find nonprofits
Step four: funding follows a living record. The proposal is replaced by something always current: what an organization does, for whom, at what cost and with what results, kept up to date as the work happens. Funders read the record, and renewals follow from it. What will replace the grant proposal?
Step five: the application disappears. Money moves when evidence of need and capacity meets a funder's stated intent, continuously, with no cycle and no form. Steps one through three are possible today. Step five is where they lead. What grantmaking looks like without applications
What step five looks like
Every organization keeps one living record. Its programs, the people it serves, its finances and its results, maintained as a byproduct of doing the work. The record belongs to the organization, which decides who can see what. Nobody writes a proposal, because the record already says everything a proposal would.
Every funder publishes its intent. What change it wants to see, where, at what scale, and what evidence would convince it. A foundation's strategy becomes a standing mandate that anyone can read and any record can be matched against.
Matching never stops. Records and mandates meet every day. When an organization's work fits a funder's intent, a person on the funder's staff reviews the evidence and decides, and the money moves. A youth program in a rural county is as visible as a hospital system in a capital city, because visibility depends on the record alone.
Every kind of money flows through the same match. A grant, a government contract, a below-market loan and an individual gift are all ways of paying for work that matters. In step five the need decides the instrument. A program that a city should pay for gets the contract, a building that a community lender should finance gets the loan, and grant money goes where only grant money can go.
Every giver gets the same diligence. A donor giving fifty dollars sees the same quality of evidence as a billion-dollar foundation. Small giving gets smarter and large giving gets faster.
Reporting dissolves into the work. Funders see progress as it happens, renewal follows results, and multi-year funding becomes the default because there is no reason to make an organization ask again.
Communities set the agenda. Residents and the organizations that serve them publish what their community needs, in the same form funders publish what they want to fund.
People spend their time on people. Grant writers become strategists and connectors. Program officers spend their weeks in communities. Executive directors spend theirs on the mission. Beth Kanter and Allison Fine call the hours automation returns "the dividend of time". In step five, the whole sector collects it.
Why it is closer than it sounds
Most of the raw material already exists. Every US foundation files a public tax return listing its grants, its officers and whether it takes applications. Federal spending is published award by award. What was missing was the ability to read all of it, continuously, and act on what it says.
Parts of step five already work. Quillify reads the filings of private foundations to show which accept applications, which fund organizations like yours, and which have officers or trustees your board may know. It reads an award letter into a schedule of every obligation that comes with the money, and drafts the progress report from the status of each deliverable. Each is a piece of the living record, running now, for organizations of any size.
What has to be true
People decide. Funding is a choice about values. Matching surfaces the evidence, and a person makes the call and can explain it.
Organizations own their records. Nothing is shared without consent, and an organization can see exactly what any funder sees.
The hard-to-measure are protected. Systems favor what is easy to count. Grassroots groups, new organizations and communities with little data need deliberate paths in, or the match will reward the already visible.
Evidence is verified. A living record is only worth trusting if its figures trace back to a source.
Funders are as open as applicants. Published mandates, decisions and reasons make the system accountable in both directions.
The workaround can go
The grant application did its job for a century. It let small staffs make large decisions in a world where reading was the bottleneck. That world is ending, and the workaround can end with it.
What replaces it is a sector where money finds the work, where the smallest organization is as visible as the largest, and where everyone's time goes to the mission. Quillify is building toward that from the organization's side, one step at a time, starting with the steps that are possible today.
What you can do today
- Find the foundations that accept applications
- Find the funders your board already knows
- Reuse one proposal across funders
- See what each funder allows with AI
More in this series: Will AI replace grant writers?, Will there ever be one grant application for every funder?, How will foundations find nonprofits in the future?, What will replace the grant proposal?, What will grantmaking look like without applications?, What are the risks of AI in philanthropy?.
Start on the steps that are possible today.
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