# Nonprofit AI: Google Chrome Skills and the Center for AI Safety

An episode of [Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1536843269), 28 Apr 2026, 22 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1029925/episodes/19091787-nonprofit-ai-google-chrome-skills-and-the-center-for-ai-safety.mp3

This week, Carolyn Woodard covers two resources: a practical new browser feature for Google Workspace shops and a nonprofit watchdog organization working to make the AI industry more accountable. Whether you're trying to get more out of your existing tools or looking for credible resources to bring to a board conversation about AI risk, this episode has something useful. This episode covers: • Google quietly rolled out a feature called Skills inside Chrome — it lets you save a prompt once and run it on any web page with a click, without retyping. Pre-built Skills are also available for common tasks like summarizing long documents or comparing information across open tabs, no prompt-writing required. • Skills is a reading and analysis assistant, not an agent — it won't take actions like making purchases or browsing on your behalf. It reads what's already in front of you in the browser and helps you process it faster. • If your nonprofit is in the Google ecosystem and staff are hesitant to write prompts from scratch, Skills' pre-built library is a low-barrier starting point. Useful use cases include reviewing foundation grant pages and comparing information across multiple sites. • The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a San Francisco-based research and advocacy nonprofit whose mission is to reduce societal-scale risks from AI. Their website (safe.ai) isn't a vendor — it's an independent watchdog with accessible explainers, free courses, and fellowship programs. • CAIS offers a free AI Safety, Ethics and Society course that's relevant for nonprofits building AI literacy on a budget, plus a fellowship for people doing advocacy work around AI governance, bias, or data center impacts. • When staff or board members are skeptical about AI — or when you need a credible outside voice for your AI strategy conversations — CAIS is a more trustworthy resource than asking the AI companies themselves what's safe. Resources Mentioned: • https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-google-chrome-ai-powered-skills/ • https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/skills-in-chrome/ • https://safe.ai • https://safe.ai/ai-risk • https://aisafetybook.com/virtual-course • https://www.reddit.com/r/NonprofitITManagement/ _______________________________ Start a conversation :) • Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/ • email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com • on LinkedIn • on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement • on the Community IT website Thanks for listening.

## Transcript

[0:22] Carolyn Woodard: Hello and welcome to the Community IT Innovators, nonprofit AI podcast, midweek check-in.
[0:30] Carolyn Woodard: My name is Carolyn Woodard.
[0:32] Carolyn Woodard: I am the outreach director for Community IT.
[0:34] Carolyn Woodard: I run the webinar program.
[0:36] Carolyn Woodard: I host the podcasts.
[0:38] Carolyn Woodard: I am not an AI expert.
[0:40] Carolyn Woodard: Right now, nobody really is.
[0:42] Carolyn Woodard: And even if you are an expert in one area, you can't be an expert in all of the areas.
[0:47] Carolyn Woodard: So the purpose of this midweek check-in is just to share some stories and resources and news that could be relevant for nonprofits wherever you are in your journey.
[0:57] Carolyn Woodard: If you just starting out want to know what AI is, if you've been using AI for a while and want to know how to use it better, we're happy that you're here and thank you for joining us.
[1:07] Carolyn Woodard: So
[1:08] Carolyn Woodard: Today I have just a couple of stories that I noticed that I wanted to share.
[1:13] Carolyn Woodard: So if you are using one of the big AI platforms that nonprofits are using, so Copilot in Microsoft, Gemini in Google Workspace, or Claude, which is a standalone and can work with either of them.
[1:27] Carolyn Woodard: In fact, all of them can work with any of them, basically.
[1:31] Carolyn Woodard: You know that those platforms are moving fast.
[1:34] Carolyn Woodard: They are releasing new updates, they're releasing new features, they change the menu around.
[1:40] Carolyn Woodard: So you're like, wait, I remember this was a tab over here on the left, and now it's a tab on the right.
[1:45] Carolyn Woodard: So I would like to try and keep you updated with that.
[1:50] Carolyn Woodard: And uh, you know, it's hard to track all of it yourself.
[1:53] Carolyn Woodard: And exactly as they're adding new features, it can be hard to know what that little click will do.
[1:58] Carolyn Woodard: Uh,
[1:59] Carolyn Woodard: Google just made a change to their Chrome browser that I wanted to mention.
[2:06] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, they didn't do a big fanfare, but I thought it was really interesting.
[2:10] Carolyn Woodard: And then I also want to talk about an organization that is asking a lot of big questions behind AI.
[2:17] Carolyn Woodard: Who's keeping AI safe and what does that mean for nonprofits?
[2:22] Carolyn Woodard: So
[2:24] Carolyn Woodard: Google rolled out a new feature called Skills inside of their Chrome browser in April.
[2:32] Carolyn Woodard: It is built on top of the Gemini integration that's already in the browser.
[2:36] Carolyn Woodard: Now, this is something I have to admit, I don't usually use AI in the browser very often.
[2:42] Carolyn Woodard: I tend to gravitate toward the standalone apps, desktop apps.
[2:47] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[2:48] Carolyn Woodard: I have used uh Copilot within Microsoft Tools.
[2:53] Carolyn Woodard: So if you open Word, there's a little, you know, the old star pattern, and you can click on that, and it Copilot will ask how it can help you with whatever you're trying to draft.
[3:02] Carolyn Woodard: Or if you're in Excel, same thing.
[3:03] Carolyn Woodard: There's a little icon and you can get uh help within the tool.
[3:08] Carolyn Woodard: Uh
[3:09] Carolyn Woodard: If you're using it with work, which we always recommend, you should be logging in with your work email and you should have a paid version if you can.
[3:18] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, and those paid versions can be lot, there's lots of different tiers.
[3:23] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so you don't have to invest in the enterprise version for everyone at your office, but you might want to get just a personal version for yourself.
[3:31] Carolyn Woodard: Always check and see if there's a nonprofit discount, of course.
[3:35] Carolyn Woodard: Apparently, there's a whole world of people who use the AI within their browser.
[3:42] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, so either the Gemini integration that's built into Chrome or the Copilot integration that's built into Edge.
[3:50] Carolyn Woodard: And so this new feature that Google's rolling out is uh called Skills.
[3:56] Carolyn Woodard: So the idea is that instead of retyping an AI prompt every time you want to do a recurring task in your browser, you can save it as a Skill and you can run it on any web page with a click.
[4:10] Carolyn Woodard: Google has also created some pre-programmed Skills.
[4:14] Carolyn Woodard: So things that you might find yourself doing.
[4:17] Carolyn Woodard: And those you don't even need to create it.
[4:20] Carolyn Woodard: It you just click on it and it will do it in the web page that you're looking at.
[4:24] Carolyn Woodard: So the way it works, as I said, you write the prompt once, you save it as a Skill, and then you can trigger it.
[4:31] Carolyn Woodard: There's a little plus button that you can use while you're browsing.
[4:34] Carolyn Woodard: It can work across multiple tabs that you have open at once, so not just the page that you're on.
[4:40] Carolyn Woodard: So if you're not comfortable or don't totally understand how to save a Skill that you've prompted, you don't have to start from scratch.
[4:49] Carolyn Woodard: You can use their pre-built ones if it's something that you're looking for.
[4:53] Carolyn Woodard: And I'm sure they're going to keep adding to the library as well.
[4:57] Carolyn Woodard: So
[4:58] Carolyn Woodard: This is different from opening Gemini in a Google window and using it, or using Claude in a separate window in your Chrome browser.
[5:09] Carolyn Woodard: So
[5:09] Carolyn Woodard: When you use an AI tool in your desktop app, or you open a tab and open Gemini and use it through the browser, you're working kind of beside the web.
[5:23] Carolyn Woodard: You are inputting, you have to cut and paste the input, or you have to input your question to the fields to have it answer your question.
[5:34] Carolyn Woodard: It goes out as we've talked about, it analyzes the packets, goes lickety split to the data center, figures out which packets of words come back to answer that kind of a question and what type of information you're looking for based on the other times that that question has been asked and answered.
[5:53] Carolyn Woodard: And, you know, using its built-in learning and model, it is returning you this answer.
[6:00] Carolyn Woodard: The browser native AI is built into the browser.
[6:05] Carolyn Woodard: So it can see what you're looking at in real time.
[6:07] Carolyn Woodard: It can see the website that you're looking at, quote unquote, see.
[6:11] Carolyn Woodard: It's not a person, it's not looking at it, but it's able to analyze what's on the website that you're looking at.
[6:17] Carolyn Woodard: Skills is Google's formalized version of what Copilot has been doing in Microsoft Edge for a while.
[6:26] Carolyn Woodard: So if your nonprofit staff are mostly in Chrome, you're a Google Workplace shop, and a lot of people are comfortable using Chrome, you're on devices that are using Chrome, uh, not Edge, then this is an upgrade.
[6:40] Carolyn Woodard: So it's trying to reach what Edge has been doing.
[6:43] Carolyn Woodard: And it may even be uh leapfrogging a little bit.
[6:46] Carolyn Woodard: It's trying to um to be fine, parity, be as useful.
[6:51] Carolyn Woodard: So
[6:52] Carolyn Woodard: Some examples from Google's library are that you can summarize lengthy documents or lengthy web pages.
[7:00] Carolyn Woodard: You can compare product specs.
[7:03] Carolyn Woodard: So if you're looking at a new TV on different sites or different TVs, it you can have all those tabs open and then uh click on this Skill to compare them and it will look at those pages, tabs that you have open and give you a comparison.
[7:22] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, it can calculate nutrition information from a recipe page.
[7:27] Carolyn Woodard: So there's that, that's the sort of thing that these Skills can do.
[7:32] Carolyn Woodard: It is a reading and analysis assistant, so it's not an agent.
[7:36] Carolyn Woodard: I was afraid when I first heard about this.
[7:39] Carolyn Woodard: Is it going to shop for me?
[7:41] Carolyn Woodard: Like, is it going to find credit card information, you know, and and uh it has my address, and I've been using the Chrome browser to shop, and it's just going to, you know, I'm going to look for black pants and it's going to find them, order them, and they're going to show up at my door.
[7:59] Carolyn Woodard: So that is not what this is.
[8:01] Carolyn Woodard: There are agents that can do that, but that is not what Skills can do.
[8:04] Carolyn Woodard: You are still doing the browsing, you are doing the decision making, it can make it faster for you to process what's in front of you or analyze these sorts of things instead of having to look through the different, especially when you're making a decision about a purchase.
[8:18] Carolyn Woodard: There is an agentic version where the Gemini agent can take actions for you, like book a reservation or make a purchase, but that is a separate feature.
[8:31] Carolyn Woodard: It's not being rolled out to everyone, which you know, thankfully, you have to have that be part of something that you've purchased.
[8:37] Carolyn Woodard: And I'm sure they make it very clear that it's it will be shopping for you.
[8:42] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so
[8:44] Carolyn Woodard: I find all this interesting because about it's probably nine months ago, so the end of the summer last year, I was going to meet a friend on a weekend on a Sunday.
[8:55] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but my friend could only meet me at nine o'clock in the morning, and we wanted to have brunch.
[8:59] Carolyn Woodard: So, as a person, a human, I know that a lot of places aren't open yet.
[9:05] Carolyn Woodard: They open at 11 on Sundays.
[9:08] Carolyn Woodard: So
[9:09] Carolyn Woodard: I had the bright idea to ask Gemini because I figured Google Maps is right there.
[9:14] Carolyn Woodard: So I asked Gemini, here's the metro station where I'm meeting my friend.
[9:19] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, can you give me a list of five restaurants that are within walking distance of this metro station and open at 9 a.m.
[9:28] Carolyn Woodard: on Sunday?
[9:29] Carolyn Woodard: And Gemini very confidently gave me a list of five different restaurants.
[9:35] Carolyn Woodard: And as I clicked through just to check, none of them were open at 9 a.m.
[9:40] Carolyn Woodard: They were all walkable, they were all close to this metro um station, but none of them were open.
[9:46] Carolyn Woodard: Just a quick look at the Google Maps listing for those restaurants that had the hours could show that they weren't open.
[9:54] Carolyn Woodard: So I was very deep disappointed.
[9:57] Carolyn Woodard: I thought, you know, Gemini just isn't up to this task.
[10:01] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and I, you know, I didn't really, it's
[10:04] Carolyn Woodard: It's a natural task to ask that I expected an AI to be good at doing.
[10:11] Carolyn Woodard: So I don't want to look at all of these hours that are available in Google Maps.
[10:16] Carolyn Woodard: I want the AI to look at those hours and give me only the restaurants that are open at nine.
[10:23] Carolyn Woodard: But especially at that time, nine months ago, Gemini and the other AI tools, it wasn't actually checking a live website or using the Google Maps data.
[10:35] Carolyn Woodard: It was just pattern matching.
[10:37] Carolyn Woodard: It was guessing.
[10:39] Carolyn Woodard: It could find restaurants that had been referenced as being close to that metro station, but it was guessing at when they would be open.
[10:48] Carolyn Woodard: And it had no idea that Sunday at nine o'clock is a problem, which was the whole point of why I asked it that question.
[10:56] Carolyn Woodard: So this is a bit of the gap that the native AI in the browser is trying to be able to close.
[11:03] Carolyn Woodard: It can see what you're seeing on the web page in front of you, and it's reading that content instead of guessing.
[11:11] Carolyn Woodard: So it's not perfect.
[11:12] Carolyn Woodard: And I didn't really expect it to be perfect when I originally asked this question because you know, if you've looked at Google Maps, like businesses don't update their hours.
[11:20] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, restaurants particularly, they might be closed for a holiday, they may be closed for a family emergency, and no one updates the hours because it's not what you do.
[11:30] Carolyn Woodard: You know, if you're going to the restaurant in real time, you just look for a different restaurant if it's closed and you didn't expect it to be.
[11:37] Carolyn Woodard: So, you know, AI can't help with that.
[11:41] Carolyn Woodard: If the website isn't right, then AI isn't going to, even if it's reading it, it's not going to be able to give you the real information.
[11:47] Carolyn Woodard: But being able to read what's actually on the website is an improvement over the hallucination that I got of like, here's five restaurants, you know, any of them will work, and none of them would.
[11:59] Carolyn Woodard: I will say though that as far as I understand it, the AI Skill still is not able to browse for you.
[12:07] Carolyn Woodard: So you can't ask it to go out and and give you return websites to you that will have this information.
[12:14] Carolyn Woodard: You would be finding those tabs and then asking it to do the analysis across the tabs of the websites that it can quote unquote see.
[12:23] Carolyn Woodard: So
[12:24] Carolyn Woodard: It's getting a lot better at analyzing content.
[12:27] Carolyn Woodard: It still is going to have problems finding accurate information and you know, confidence.
[12:35] Carolyn Woodard: The AIs are tools are very, very confident.
[12:38] Carolyn Woodard: They're still very confident.
[12:39] Carolyn Woodard: Even when you ask them to tell you when they think they have a 95% chance of being correct on something, they'll seize it.
[12:48] Carolyn Woodard: So if you have staff, if you are in Google Workspace and you're using Chrome, as I said, you know, this is a really good feature to explore.
[12:58] Carolyn Woodard: Just see if it's something that can help you.
[13:00] Carolyn Woodard: If you're doing, you know, analyzing something that's a long document, like a privacy policy or terms and conditions, it can help you with what it can actually see in the browser.
[13:12] Carolyn Woodard: If you have staff who are not confident in being able to write a prompt or save a skill, the fact that they have this library with these very common things that you might want it to do, you know, you can just look through that and see if any of those would be useful in something that you're doing.
[13:29] Carolyn Woodard: Maybe you are doing donor research or you're looking at um foundation information on grants.
[13:38] Carolyn Woodard: So being able to compare across websites use cases where this built-in AI to your browser could be helpful to you as a nonprofit, especially if you're already in the Google ecosystem.
[13:50] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but
[13:51] Carolyn Woodard: When AI tools fail, it is interesting to understand why, uh, which is something you can ask an AI tool.
[14:00] Carolyn Woodard: Like, what like uh when I had the restaurant fail, I kind of chided it.
[14:06] Carolyn Woodard: I was like, well, none of these are open.
[14:08] Carolyn Woodard: And of course, being uh AI, it said, Oh, you're right.
[14:11] Carolyn Woodard: Thanks for pointing that out.
[14:13] Carolyn Woodard: But you can ask it, you know, why did you return those results?
[14:16] Carolyn Woodard: And uh how did you do the analysis?
[14:20] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, so it can tell you why it made something up or made an assumption or guessed.
[14:26] Carolyn Woodard: Understanding those limitations can also help you as you go forward know when to trust, you know, what it's returning to you, how often you need to verify stuff, especially if it's something new that you're asking it to do.
[14:40] Carolyn Woodard: It hasn't done it before, then you need to.
[14:43] Carolyn Woodard: I heard someone say treat it like a an intern, a very brand new intern, and you have to check everything that they do.
[14:51] Carolyn Woodard: So I will include some of the stories about this.
[14:55] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, there is a good how-to-use Skills in Google Chrome uh on Wired.
[15:02] Carolyn Woodard: Uh so if you have a subscription there, uh you can uh have a look at it.
[15:06] Carolyn Woodard: Also, Google, of course, has information on their blog about it.
[15:10] Carolyn Woodard: Uh,
[15:10] Carolyn Woodard: The second resource I wanted to share is a website, an organization called the Center for AI Safety or C-A-I-S pronounced CACE.
[15:20] Carolyn Woodard: The website is safe.ai.
[15:23] Carolyn Woodard: It's based in San Francisco.
[15:26] Carolyn Woodard: It's a research and advocacy nonprofit, and their mission is to reduce the societal scale risks from AI through technical research, field building, and policy advocacy.
[15:37] Carolyn Woodard: So
[15:38] Carolyn Woodard: They are behind a uh statement on AI risk that came out a couple of years ago that a lot of researchers and executives signed saying that the AI risk was in the same realm as pandemics or nuclear weapons.
[15:55] Carolyn Woodard: So you may have been seeing stories about uh people in the AI industry who have become convinced that the AI will become sentient, that it is going to enable really bad impulses among uh humans and potentially do really bad things to the planet, and not just through us creating the data centers, but through the AI itself.
[16:18] Carolyn Woodard: So if you're in those doomsday uh scenarios, um, I try not to read too many of them because I find them really uh frightening.
[16:26] Carolyn Woodard: But uh
[16:27] Carolyn Woodard: This website, I think, is uh really interesting because it's not a tool, it doesn't have its own tool, it's not a vendor, it's a nonprofit, it's a watchdog.
[16:36] Carolyn Woodard: And they have a lot of resources on their site that you might be interested in looking into.
[16:41] Carolyn Woodard: They have some really accessible explainers on that AI risk written for a general audience.
[16:48] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so you know, if you're worried about those doomsday scenarios, you can have, or if you have people at staff at your organization who are really worried about AI and if they use it, it's going to somehow enable it to do these bad things.
[17:02] Carolyn Woodard: Um you might want to have a look at these resources that explain the types of risks they're looking at.
[17:08] Carolyn Woodard: They offer a free AI safety, ethics and society course that you can sign up for right on their website, which is really relevant for nonprofits that want to build AI literacy, and it's free, so that's a good price point.
[17:23] Carolyn Woodard: They have a fellowship program, the AI and Society Fellowship, for people researching the societal aspects of AI.
[17:31] Carolyn Woodard: So if you do advocacy work, um if you're working on advocacy around data centers, around bias in AI, around the other uh issues that we're running into, uh, if you're interested, as a lot of us are, in insisting that the tech companies build safer AI, that it's safer for users, that it's less exploitive, that it might not have the nudified tools, for example, that they're using in elementary schools.
[18:02] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, insisting on those types of regulations and those types of tools that would be a lot more secure and a lot have a lot more safety built into them, then this uh fellowship might be interesting to your organization as well.
[18:14] Carolyn Woodard: So we can look into that.
[18:16] Carolyn Woodard: But um,
[18:17] Carolyn Woodard: I just wanted to talk about it because you we talk a lot about the tools and about AI literacy and about exploring and trying.
[18:24] Carolyn Woodard: And uh we're talking about these tools built by these huge companies.
[18:29] Carolyn Woodard: So CAIS is an organization, a watchdog, and there are other organizations like it, especially in the EU, that are actively trying to influence the companies and the government regulations around them.
[18:43] Carolyn Woodard: So I just think it's a good resource.
[18:46] Carolyn Woodard: I loved poking around on their website today, so I uh would recommend taking a look at that.
[18:53] Carolyn Woodard: It makes you a smarter consumer.
[18:55] Carolyn Woodard: Your nonprofit can have a more credible voice when you're talking about these AI aspects that you want to be careful of around the communities you care about.
[19:05] Carolyn Woodard: Or on the other side, if you have board members, executives, staff members who are concerned about using AI at all, this website has a lot of good ways to talk about what the risks are and what the issues are.
[19:19] Carolyn Woodard: So if you can point a board member to that, um, it's not asking Claude or asking Gemini or looking at what Google says about how safe it is or what Microsoft says about how safe it is.
[19:32] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, it's an external um watchdog, so it might be a better, more trustworthy resource.
[19:40] Carolyn Woodard: I will share those links also with you about uh the risk overview and the free course that they have in the show notes.
[19:48] Carolyn Woodard: And I just wanted to, you know, share a couple of resources with you.
[19:53] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[19:53] Carolyn Woodard: Google Chrome Skills is a really practical feature.
[19:58] Carolyn Woodard: So if you're using Google and you're using AI in your browser or interested in seeing what AI in your browser can do, have a look at that.
[20:06] Carolyn Woodard: Um, the
[20:07] Carolyn Woodard: CAIS, the Center for AI Safety, uh is a good resource for the bigger picture of where this industry is going.
[20:15] Carolyn Woodard: And if you're having those types of big picture conversation with your board, with your funders, with your executives about your AI strategy and your governance, uh that might be a good resource for you as well.
[20:29] Carolyn Woodard: So as always, AI isn't slowing down and it isn't going anywhere.
[20:34] Carolyn Woodard: It's our job to stay curious, stay informed, and keep asking and demanding together, collectively, what we want these tools to be like as we move forward.
[20:44] Carolyn Woodard: So I want to thank you so much for joining me today.
[20:47] Carolyn Woodard: I will be back in your podcast feed on Friday with our regular technology topics topic, and back here again on every Tuesday with some more uh news and resources that you can use around nonprofits and AI.
[21:04] Carolyn Woodard: So until then, take care.

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