Why ClickBid Isn’t Replacing People with AI (and What We’re Doing Instead)

By Matt Burnell, Founder of ClickBid

Last week, I took some time off. Well… sort of. If you’re a founder, you know how “vacation” usually means “uninterrupted time for research and thinking.” For me, that meant continuing to dig deeper into something that’s been top of mind for over a year now: artificial intelligence, specifically, how AI fits into the future of ClickBid and nonprofit fundraising.

There’s a lot of noise around AI—pessimism, optimism, and everything in between. But when I zoom out, I come back to one guiding question: how do we use AI to better serve nonprofits? That’s been ClickBid’s mission for over two decades, and it’s what drives every product decision we make.

It’s Not About Replacement—It’s About Elevation

ClickBid is a software platform, yes. But we’re also an event support company. Every member of our team has been to live fundraising events. We’ve trained volunteers. We’ve fixed auction tables on the fly. We’ve helped guests check in and troubleshoot their bidder accounts. We’ve lived the challenges of event night—and that gives us a rare, unique and real-world perspective on how our nonprofits get through their events.

To be clear, this is why we’re not using AI to cut corners or replace our people.

Instead, we’re building AI to support our team—to free them up to focus on what matters most: helping nonprofits answer the why questions.

Let me explain.

At any fundraising event, there are always the same three types of questions:

1. Where do I find this?
2. What does this button do?
3. How do I use this?

These are the practical, task-based questions—important, but repetitive. They’re the kind of questions that could easily be answered by AI.

Then there’s the why questions:

• Why should I send a text now instead of later?
• Why is this item a better fit for our audience?
• Why is our donor engagement down compared to last year?

These questions require real experience, judgment, and context. And that’s where our team shines.

AI can (and should) handle the first layer of questions. But our people—like Hannah on daily chat support—handle the second. That’s intentional. That’s the strategy.

The AI Blueprint at ClickBid

We’ve been working on ways to responsibly integrate AI into our platform. And by “responsibly,” I mean:

• Anonymizing data so we never expose personal donor information.
• Building better tools, not human replacing chatbots.
• Enhancing support resources, not replacing it to save money.

For example, our AI can already surface insights like:

• The top 5 auction items sold above fair market value in the past 3 months.
• Items with the most bids.
• Donation patterns during key campaign windows.

Our account team couldn’t possibly recall that data in real time. But an AI can. And that makes our people smarter, more helpful, and more strategic in their conversations with you. Why? Because with that valuable information, they can help make “why” recommendations with your nonprofit team.

Think of AI like the four volunteers checking guests in at a gala. They’re doing the bulk of the work—fast, efficient, friendly. But there’s always someone nearby who’s pacing behind the table, ready to jump in when something unexpected happens.

That’s our model. It’s been our model since the earliest events at ClickBid.

AI Should Lift Us Higher

In sales, we talk about funnels. But this “what, how, where” and “why” concept is more like an inverted funnel. At the bottom are the what/how/where questions. At the top is the why. My goal with AI is to help our staff move up the funnel—to spend less time on the repetitive and more time on the meaningful.

It’s the same for our customers.

If you’re using AI to write a donor appeal, it shouldn’t just spit out a paragraph for you to copy/paste. It should give you a head start, a rough draft, a push into creative mode. So you can spend your time crafting the message that connects—not starting at a blank page. Full transparency, I used AI to summarize my podcast on this topic into this article. However, I have added what I feel are critical pieces of information to this blog article to make it more effective.

We’ve Been Through a Lot—This Is Just the Next Chapter

Since ClickBid launched, we’ve weathered:

• The 2008 financial housing crisis
• COVID and the rise of virtual events
• Inflation, political polarization, and now AI

It’s always something. But we’ve stuck around because we’ve never lost sight of the value we bring: real people helping real nonprofits raise real money.

So no, we’re not going to replace our support team with AI. We’re not chasing the trend of AI agents replacing staff. We’re chasing something better—more capacity for strategic support, more insight, and more time spent on the why.

If AI helps us help you more effectively, then we’re doing it right.

Thanks for reading. And hey—if you’re ever wondering “Why?” about your event strategy, fundraising tools, or even AI… we’d love to talk.