Virtuous’ Nathan Chappell on the CAIO shift: From technical oversight to organizational conscience

Nathan Chappell's first ML model in 2017 outperformed his organization's previous fundraising techniques by 5x—but that was just the beginning. As Virtuous's first Chief AI Officer, he's pioneering what he calls "responsible and beneficial" AI deployment, going beyond standard governance frameworks to address long-term mission alignment. His radical thesis: the CAIO role has evolved from technical oversight to serving as the organizational conscience in an era where AI touches every business process.

Topics Discussed:

• The Conscience Function of CAIO Role: Nathan positions the CAIO as "the conscience of the organization" rather than technical oversight, given that "AI is among in and through everything within the organization"—a fundamental redefinition as AI becomes ubiquitous across all business processes
• "Responsible and Beneficial" AI Framework: Moving beyond standard responsible AI to include beneficial impact—where responsible covers privacy and ethics, but beneficial requires examining long-term consequences, particularly critical for organizations operating in the "currency of trust"
• Hiring Philosophy Shift: Moving from "subject matter experts that had like 15 years domain experience" to "scrappy curious generalists who know how to connect dots"—a complete reversal of traditional expertise-based hiring for the AI era
• The November 30, 2022 Best Practice Reset: Nathan's framework that "if you have a best practice that predates November 30th, 2022, then it's an outdated practice"—using ChatGPT's launch as the inflection point for rethinking organizational processes
• Strategic AI Deployment Pattern: Organizations succeeding through narrow, specific, and intentional AI implementation versus those failing with broad "we just need to use AI" approaches—includes practical frameworks for identifying appropriate AI applications
• Solving Aristotle's 2,300-Year Philanthropic Problem: Using machine learning to quantify connection and solve what Aristotle identified as the core challenge of philanthropy—determining "who to give it to, when, and what purpose, and what way"
• Failure Days as Organizational Learning Architecture: Monthly sessions where teams present failed experiments to incentivize risk-taking and cross-pollination—operational framework for building curiosity culture in traditionally risk-averse nonprofit environments
• Information Doubling Acceleration Impact: Connecting Eglantine Jeb's 1927 observation that "the world is not unimaginative or ungenerous, it's just very busy" to today's 12-hour information doubling cycle, with AI potentially reducing this to hours by 2027