Artificial intelligence is poised to reshape our world more profoundly than any technology since electricity. Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs globally will be affected. Educators are scrambling to determine what students should learn when machines can write, code and analyze. Ethicists warn that AI systems are encoding biases and making consequential decisions with little oversight.

And Jewish philanthropy? Largely silent. Largely absent. This is not acceptable.

With its deep commitment to tikkun olam (repairing the world), education and preparing future generations, Jewish philanthropy has both an obligation and an opportunity to lead in this moment. We must not treat AI as someone else’s concern.

What makes AI different from previous technological shifts is not just its power but its speed. The changes that took the internet two decades to produce may unfold in two years. Philanthropic institutions designed for deliberation and long-term planning must learn to move faster without abandoning wisdom.

First, AI development desperately needs the moral frameworks Jewish tradition provides — and Jewish philanthropists are positioned to bring them to the table.

The companies building AI systems are moving extraordinarily fast. Their engineers and executives are brilliant, but they are also young, concentrated in a handful of coastal cities and shaped by a narrow set of cultural assumptions. The ethical frameworks guiding AI development are often improvised, corporate and reactive.

Jewish tradition offers something different: millennia of rigorous thinking about human dignity, the limits of knowledge, the obligations of the powerful to the vulnerable and the imperative to remember what has been forgotten. These are not abstract concepts. They are precisely what AI governance needs.

Consider: When I work to locate and memorialize forgotten Holocaust mass graves — sites where Jews were murdered without documentation, erased from history — I am engaged in an act of restoration. AI systems trained on historical data risk compounding historical erasures, encoding the biases of incomplete archives into systems that will shape decisions for generations. Who will advocate for what the algorithms cannot see? Who will insist that human dignity cannot be reduced to data points?

Jewish philanthropy should be funding chairs in AI ethics at major universities. We should be convening technologists and rabbis, engineers and ethicists. We should be ensuring that when policymakers in Washington and Brussels debate AI regulation, Jewish voices informed by Jewish values are at the table — not as special pleaders, but as contributors to universal human flourishing.

Second, if Jewish ethics should help shape AI’s development, we must start embedding that thinking across every institution we fund.

The call for Jewish moral leadership rings hollow if our own schools, seminaries and community organizations remain unprepared for a world already being transformed.

Walk into most Jewish day schools today and ask: What is your policy on students using AI tools? You will likely get a shrug, or a patchwork of individual teacher preferences, or an outright ban that students circumvent on their phones. Visit a rabbinical seminary and ask whether future clergy are being trained to use AI thoughtfully — for sermon preparation, pastoral care research, or community management. The answer, overwhelmingly, is no.

This is a failure of philanthropic leadership. We fund Jewish education without asking whether that education prepares young people for the world they will actually inherit. We fund leadership development without equipping leaders with the tools already reshaping every profession.

The practical questions are urgent. Should a day school teach students to use AI as a research partner, or ban it as a form of cheating? Can AI tools help under-resourced Jewish communities access educational content they could never otherwise afford? Could an AI system help a small-town rabbi prepare for a shiva call by surfacing relevant texts and precedents in minutes rather than hours? Could AI-powered translation finally make Jewish learning accessible to the millions of Jews who cannot read Hebrew?

These are not futuristic hypotheticals. The tools exist today. What is missing is philanthropic leadership to fund pilot programs, develop best practices and share what works across institutions.

And the potential for tikkun olam is immense. AI can help identify individuals at risk of food insecurity before they reach crisis. It can match volunteers with opportunities based on skills and availability. It can analyze patterns in social service delivery to help federations allocate resources more effectively. But none of this happens automatically. It requires investment, experimentation, and the willingness to try new approaches.

I am not a technologist who dismisses legitimate concerns about AI. Nor am I a Luddite who fears all change. I am a businessman who has spent his career at the intersection of technology and human potential. What I know is this: Technology does not have values. People do. Institutions do. And the philanthropic sector is how we express collective values across generations.

The opportunity before us is not merely defensive. It is generative. We can bring the depth of Jewish ethical reasoning to conversations that desperately need it. We can ensure the institutions we fund are equipped to thrive, not scramble.

But we must start now. The technology is not waiting. Neither can we.

Businessman and philanthropist Harley Lippman is the founder and CEO of Genesis10, an IT consulting and staffing company.