Published: 5 February 2025

By Julia Machalska, Civil Service Fast Streamer 

I can’t believe how quickly my six months on secondment to the AMRC flew by! I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to join such a fantastic and dedicated team and to experience working in the charity sector.

When the Science and Engineering Civil Service Fast Stream informed me of my secondment to the AMRC, I was excited to learn that my focus would be generative AI and its potential role in charities. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create novel content such as text or images, with ChatGPT being the most well-known example. While it offers opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce the time taken to complete routine tasks — often a challenge in capacity constrained teams and small organisations — there are also associated risks and limitations that users need to bear in mind.

This project was a great developmental opportunity, and I was handed the lead from day one. This gave me space to shape its direction and eventual outputs, while my colleagues supported me through every step of my journey to explore how the AMRC can best support its 150+ members to navigate this rapidly advancing field.

I began by speaking with member charities to gain their perspective on all things generative AI. They demonstrated a variety of experience in this field ranging from ‘we’re eager to explore this topic but haven’t really started yet’ to ‘we’ve set up a team dedicated to looking at AI’ and everything in-between. It became clear that there is an urgent desire across the AMRC membership to gain a better understanding of how they can use generative AI.

So much of the information is already out there but having spent several months understanding the field, and reviewing hundreds of pages of documents, I was keen to provide a set of introductory notes that summarise the basics and save our members’ time. I was careful to consider how quickly certain information would go ‘out of date’, having discovered that many AI chatbots, tools and services frequently change their T&Cs. My hope is that these notes will help individuals and organisations with little or no knowledge of this topic to start exploring and having conversations about using generative AI, opening the door to further learning as well as peer support from those that are active in this space.  

Whilst I worked on this, I also contemplated AMRC’s use of generative AI. As a small charity, what internal learning could we take away from this project? How do we ensure that we’re not just sharing information, but also leading by example?  AMRC are now exploring how to use generative AI internally.  

Alongside my main project, I had the chance to get involved in delivering an external event exploring the future of AI in the charity sector together with Submittable (an AMRC Supporter organisation), as well as joining a team exploring how our member charities demonstrate the impact of their research. A particular highlight of my placement was the AMRC Summer Social, which provided an opportunity to interact with our members and learn more about the fantastic research they are funding in a more relaxed setting.

As I return to government for my final year of the scheme, I will look back at my time at the AMRC with fondness, and I am sure that all the things I learned about generative AI, project management and how research charities operate will continue to assist me throughout my future career.

Finally, while the work on generative AI in this sector is only just beginning, I am glad that I had the opportunity to work on such a fast-moving topic and I hope that the resources I leave behind will help others to embark on this technological journey.