AI Goes Mainstream at bbcon 2026: What Nonprofits Need to Know

If you’ve checked out the bbcon 2026 session catalog, you’ve probably noticed that AI is everywhere. Session topics range from the foundational aspects of this powerful technology to hands-on demos of new Blackbaud AI features.

That range of topics signals something important. The conversation has shifted from asking whether nonprofits should use AI to asking how AI shows up in nonprofit workflows.

AI’s prominence raises an important, if less glamorous, question that every nonprofit attending bbcon should be asking: is our data ready for this? In this article, we’ll look at what’s happening with AI at bbcon and why any AI feature you use depends on a solid data foundation supporting it.

The AI Sessions at bbcon 2026: From Introductory to Hands-On

The breadth of this year’s AI programming is worth noting. Sessions roughly fall into a few categories:

• Introductory sessions: Talks like “What Are Agents, Actually?” and “AI: Better Late Than Never” are built for attendees who are still getting oriented. They cut through the hype to explain what these tools do.
• Role-specific, hands-on sessions: Sessions like “Practical AI for the People Who Run the Database” shows how AI conversations have apply directly to database administrators and operations staff, the people who make it possible to have the solid data foundations that AI depends on.
• New AI applications: The “Agentic Payments” session shows how Blackbaud is working AI into financial workflows and transaction processing.
• Data-specific uses: The “Meet Your Data Health Agent” talk suggests AI tools are now being purpose-built to monitor and maintain data quality, which tells you the industry already recognizes data health as a prerequisite rather than an afterthought.

This lineup shows an industry that has moved past the phase of whether AI should be used. The questions being asked at bbcon this year are practical and role-specific.

AI Is Already Part of the Products You Use

AI has become an embedded feature across nearly every major Blackbaud product line. You may already be using it without a formal rollout or announcement:

• Raiser’s Edge NXT: AI-assisted donor insights and predictive analytics
• Financial Edge NXT: AI-powered transaction anomaly detection features
• Grantmaking: AI features support application review, applicant matching, and reporting efficiency
• CRM: AI-driven engagement scoring and relationship insights

Whether you’re an AI evangelist or a more cautious user, the technology is increasingly part of the tools you’re using on a daily basis.

The Unglamorous Cornerstone of AI: Your Data Foundation

At Omatic, we want to raise awareness of a crucial but overlooked truth: AI does not fix bad data. AI amplifies it, faster and at a much larger scale.

AI insights are only as good as your data. Predictive fundraising models, donor scoring, and financial error detection all inherit whatever data quality or dysfunction already exists in your systems. Bad inputs don’t just produce bad outputs. They produce confident-sounding (yet wrong!) outputs, which can be more dangerous than an obvious error because it’s harder to spot.

The essential data maintenance is not flashy, but it has to come first. Organizations that skip this step aren’t avoiding some hard work. They’re just scaling their existing data problems in a way that makes them difficult to fix.

Before Adopting AI: Three Questions to Consider

Ahead of bbcon, it’s worth pausing on a few honest questions:

• Do we know where our donor, financial, and program data lives, and how well those systems are connected to each other?
• Have we audited our data quality recently, or are we just assuming it’s “probably fine”?
• If we turned on an AI feature tomorrow, would we actually trust what it told us?
  

If any of those questions gave you pause, treat that as a reason to spend time on your data before adoption new AI tools. Getting the sequence right is what makes AI deliver.

Let’s Make a Plan, Together

Getting your data foundation right is what makes AI adoption return on the investment. If you’re attending bbcon 2026, we’d love to help you think this through in person. Here’s what you can do:

Join Omatic’s “Change Without Fear” session for a deeper look at what it takes to build automatic data processes that create an AI-ready data foundation.

Stop by the Omatic booth (we’ll be in the exhibition hall!) to start mapping out a data plan tailored to your organization’s systems and goals.

AI is a highlight at this year’s bbcon for a good reason. It has the power to change the game for fundraising and scale your results. But that’s only if you have a plan for solid data governance in place first. Let Omatic help you build that plan, together!

Can’t make it to bbcon this year? Get in touch with us for a conversation about AI and data.