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Opportunities

Ministry organizations can start by asking, "What are our current systems of decision-making?" To this end, organizations might first consider aspects of their work where decision-making is fairly standardized and routine. In such areas, machine learning might be applied fairly directly.

Hiring Decisions​

Areas could include application intake forms (with awareness that application bias has occurred in orgs like Amazon). Organizations could draw on historic data of applicants and which kinds of people were selected and rejected. With this data, they could surface which data to look for and which to avoid. This application can also surface the organization's own values and biases.

Those biases need not necessarily be seen as negative. Instead, AI systems may serve as mirrors for the organization, reflecting historically ideal candidates, so that an organization can seek out more candidates like them. Conversely, the AI system's results may provide the organization with surprising insights about their selection process and criteria, including unconscious biases that have historically shaped selection. Then, the organization could decide whether to adjust selection procedures to draw in candidates from other sources.

Choosing Prospective Locations​

Another decision point may include determining where to send new missionaries, what Indigenous groups to target, or what kinds of individuals are most open to hearing the gospel. AI systems may be able to find patterns within existing data that are currently invisible to the organization. They could do this by gathering assorted demographic data about target people groups and analyzing it in light of data evaluating the organization's success within the target context.

In doing so, organizations could find regions with similar demographic markers. Additionally, they could then look for applicants whose profiles are similar to the applicants who proved effective in similar contexts.

Historical Writings​

The global church has centuries of writings from faithful saints who have led the church. How might their writings be collected and made available to NLP systems in ways that give churchgoers greater access to them, and answer questions that Christians have asked and addressed again and again throughout history?

Recommender Systems​

For Christians and seekers who want to grow in their faith, organizations might deliver relevant content to them using a recommender system. For AI-enabled Bible translation, recommenders suggest candidate words or synonyms for users to apply to a translation.

For evangelistic follow-up (perhaps based on a chatbot conversation), recommenders could suggest:

  • Which seekers are most likely to respond
  • Which ones may have suspicious motives
  • What kind of content might serve the next step

Often recommender systems rely on explicit ratings and feedback from earlier users, so these systems may be better suited for some contexts more than others.

Education​

Some are imagining that AI systems might be used to tailor education plans to individual learners, as well as evaluate their performance in various subjects.