Artisanal Everything

A nonprofit economy for the age of AI

For more than two years I have been writing about how I believe nonprofits are the future of human employment in the age of AI. This is a radical assertion and I regularly receive feedback that people have difficulty envisioning what I mean.

Some wonder if I see a future so dystopian that masses of us will need to join humanitarian aid organizations. Others suspect I’ve spent too much time in the nonprofit sector and caught a case of terminal idealism. Neither is quite right.

One of the toughest parts of sharing my vision is that we are so conditioned by our existing notions of nonprofit organizations as groups of chronically underfunded, well-meaning, big-hearted, if sometimes inefficacious do-gooders. The JV squad, the kid brother or sister of the private sector.

Part of this comes from how nonprofits fund themselves: tug heartstrings, hope they’re connected to pursestrings, repeat at scale. Decades of this cycle have etched into our minds that nonprofits are the likes of Habitat for Humanity, United Way, and Make-A-Wish.

And so when I say “the future is not for profit,” many imagine me to be saying that the majority of us will be working for organizations like these, once AI comes for our private sector jobs.

This is not what I see.

Artisanal Everything

The easiest way I have found to describe my vision is to say that I see a positive post-AI future as one in which everything, everywhere becomes artisanal.

Think of a $15 loaf of bread baked in a wood-fired oven from locally milled heirloom grains — and now imagine it costs the same as a loaf at Walmart. Wildly implausible, right? You don’t need a PhD in economics to know that Wonder Bread has massive structural advantages over the bespoke baker who wonders about bread.

Photo by DDP on Unsplash

Let’s call her our artisan baker. She can produce a loaf sustainably for $15, but only a sliver of wealthy consumers can afford it. Meanwhile, over at your “local” grocery megastore, one can find a decent loaf of the same style of bread for $5. The vast majority of people are going to choose this option because it tastes fine and, more importantly, it’s what they can afford.

So we have a gap of $10 between the price of the handmade rye and the mass-produced ciabatta. What if it were possible to subsidize the independent baker $10 per loaf, so that she could charge customers $5, and almost everyone could afford her bread?

A number of things would happen. Demand for her superior product would skyrocket. She could scale up, negotiate better wholesale pricing, maybe even lower her prices. But why would she bother, if she’s already subsidized? Doesn’t her motivation evaporate without a profit motive?

No — because “nonprofit” does not mean no profit. It means operating surpluses must be reinvested in the mission of the organization, which in this case is the baker’s own compensation and improvements to her business. She can pay herself more. She can reach more customers. The incentive structure is intact.

Stretching the Definition

One of the trickiest parts of imagining a nonprofit future is realizing we can expand our conception of what qualifies as a charitable purpose. The current 501(c)(3) categories — charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, public safety, amateur sports, prevention of cruelty — sound narrow, but the boundary we’ve drawn around them is more or less arbitrary, and extremely flexibly applied.

For instance, for 70 years until 2015, the National Football League was registered as a tax-exempt “business league” under 501(c)(6). It only gave up the status voluntarily — largely to escape public criticism that a massive entertainment enterprise shouldn’t enjoy favorable tax treatment, and to avoid disclosing executive compensation. What if we chose to learn three alternative lessons from this story?

Lesson one: if you’re running an extremely efficient and effective nonprofit, it’s OK to pay extremely high salaries to staff.

As a society, by asserting that the huge pay packages of NFL commissioners were unseemly and inappropriate for a “nonprofit” employee to be receiving, implicitly we are saying nonprofit professionals should be paid less. We should ask ourselves, what rationale is that based upon? The same logic, I would argue, contributes to the persistent under-resourcing of most nonprofits. My friend, Vu Le, has written about this for years on his blog, NonprofitAF.com.

Lesson two: nonprofits can grow to create a massive amount of value even if what they do is not profitable.

The main source of the NFL’s revenue has always been the franchises, which are private entities that pay corporate taxes, but they considered the NFL’s role as a governing body valuable enough to pay costly membership dues each year — even though the NFL itself was not revenue-generating.

Lesson three: we, as a society, can choose to define or redefine the boundaries of tax exemption however we want to. We always have.

Mostly based on vibes, the public just decided after 70 years that the League was making too much money and its executives were being paid too much to be considered a nonprofit. To my knowledge the NFL had not broken any laws. It was operating as it had been for decades and was simply growing in tandem with the popularity of the game. We just decided the NFL no longer seemed “nonprofit-y” (i.e. impoverished).

Don’t get too hung up on trying to figure out what should or should not qualify for tax-exempt status. The point I’m trying to make is that the boundary separating for-profits and nonprofits is malleable. And herein lies the opportunity for our imaginations to help us create a new economy for the AI age.

The Baker as a Nonprofit

Now that we’ve established (at least for argument’s sake) the fungibility of what qualifies as a nonprofit, let’s return to our intrepid baker. If we had to stretch the current statutory definition to include her small business, how would we do it?

The charitable category gives us the most room to work with — especially if the bakery donates bread to hungry community members, or if we consider enriching a town’s culinary offerings as a form of beautification. And if our baker has studied and reanimated traditional bread-making methods that have all but disappeared? Now she’s doing education and historical preservation, too. You can see how quickly the lines blur.

The point of this exercise is to help us practice imagining all kinds of small businesses and even cottage industries as mission-driven enterprises, and to stretch the parochial definitions of what we typically think of as nonprofits.

If we can do this, if we can see how most human economic endeavors can be seen through a purpose or mission-driven lens, the last remaining piece is to decide if we believe these businesses should be granted financial protection via tax exemption, the way charitable organizations are.

Historically, our society created the nonprofit designation because we recognized there are services we value as features of the community, but which are extremely difficult if not impossible to operate profitably. Many of these activities, such as the arts and social services, cost far more to run than they can generate in revenue. So we decided one way to give them a financial leg up was to remove their obligation to pay federal taxes on their revenue.

AI Is Going to Make Everything into Nonprofit Work

So what does this have to do with AI? Pretty soon, I believe, artificial intelligence and robotics will make it so a vast percentage of human workers will be, relatively speaking, so inefficient compared to their machine counterparts, that nearly all human-involved business activities will be unprofitable to operate.

AI is going to make everything people do into “nonprofit work.” Compared to machines, it simply won’t make productive or financial sense for humans to do most work.

When this happens, and all private sector companies suddenly find themselves with every incentive to lay off human workers, fast, the public and policymakers will find ourselves urgently searching for policy ideas to help stem the avalanche of multi-sectoral job losses that will come from corporations finally figuring out how to apply AI at enterprise scale.

At Davos 2026, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, surprised many when asked about AI-driven job loss. The bank CEO said he would be open to direct government intervention to prohibit companies from laying off workers too quickly. His example was blunt:

There are 2 million commercial trucks in the United States. With AI, you may be able to push a button to run trucks. Should you do it all at once if 2 million people go from making $150,000 a year to a next job that might be $25,000? No. You’ll have civil unrest. ¹

When pressed on whether he’d accept government telling JPMorgan it can’t lay off workers, Dimon didn’t flinch: “If we have to do that to save society, we would agree.”

For one of modern capitalism’s most prominent avatars to admit the possibility of serious civil unrest caused by rapid de-employment, and to support the extraordinary step of deep government intervention in the labor decisions of private companies, paints a vivid picture of how seriously Dimon takes the situation we face. One can only imagine the information and technology he is privy to, which is informing his perspectives.

Just last week, Anthropic released new AI workflow features that sent software stocks tumbling. ² Investors saw capabilities spanning legal, accounting, finance, and research — and immediately grasped the implications for the companies currently selling pre-AI tools to handle those services. One tool, from one company, is quickly becoming capable of handling hundreds of complex workflows that used to require specialized software and highly paid professionals. I’m testing some of these tools myself, and it’s astonishing how much more I can do now than I could a year ago. Myriad companies and open-source communities are pushing these frontiers even further.

So one of the world’s top bankers’ best idea for AI policy is for government to pull the emergency brake on layoffs? Personally, I’m neither comforted nor inspired. Can’t we do better?

Of course we can.

A Better Policy Than Pulling the Emergency Brake

Leaving aside whether or not it is even feasible for the government to enforce an economy-wide prohibition on layoffs, stopgap is far from an ideal role for the public sector to play. Instead, the public sector should use its existing bodies of tax law to shelter human-led businesses, by expanding the portion of the tax code that is already designed to protect and support a specific class of entities — nonprofits. We should explore ways to allow the majority of small and medium sized businesses to rapidly convert to nonprofit operating models.

My little vignette of the baker is only one job off the top of my head (which is always thinking about food). The truth is we can fairly easily imagine almost any regular small business as a nonprofit. One of the most exciting parts of this realization is that we can begin to see the almost infinite potential for individuals, based on their specific experience and interests, to iterate and customize generic businesses into highly specialized, niche versions.

Reimagining Main Street

This is what I mean by artisanal everything. Imagine Main Street in small-town America — today a Dollar General, a gas station, and a rotation of fast food chains — able to re-diversify the kinds of goods and services on offer. Even more importantly, imagine the people living in these towns expressing their talents and entrepreneurial visions far more easily than they’ve been able to in decades.

Photo by Land O'Lakes, Inc. on Unsplash

The infrastructure for this is coming. Autonomous supply chains will soon move raw materials and finished goods from anywhere on earth to anywhere else in hours, at marginal cost — not just for mega-corporations, but for any small business. Add 3D printing and robotics, and you can envision mini manufacturing hubs just about anywhere delivery trucks and electricity can reach. A fashion designer creating locally manufactured clothing with distinctive cultural significance. A crew of ski bums prototyping next-generation equipment without ever leaving the slopes. Physical-world entrepreneurship catching up to what software entrepreneurship already looks like.

This is how we actually revitalize parts of the country that have been eviscerated by globalization and automation.

Where the Money Comes From

The last part of the equation: where does the $10 per loaf come from? From taxes on the unimaginably vast wealth that super-computation and machine labor will generate across nearly the entire global economy. A few firms — indeed a few individuals — stand to benefit so disproportionately that today’s already outrageous wealth inequities will seem egalitarian by comparison. The good news is it will be easy to figure out where the money is and who’s holding it.

There’s a political dimension here, too. Decreasing our reliance on large corporations for employment, daily consumables, and wealth-building via the stock market would be a seismic shift in the ability of money to shape our politics. If more of us could apply for grant funding to start and sustain small nonprofit businesses operated by and for local communities, we could realize a degree of financial-political independence never before seen.

Governments — federal, state, and local — should turn their focus to studying how to create evergreen small business startup funds and growth funds, which individuals could apply to for funding in much the way entrepreneurs currently turn to banks and investors.

A Better Engine

This is not communism. This is not socialism. This isn’t even UBI. It is a natural expansion of existing nonprofit policy, which is already designed to protect unprofitable goods and services that society considers too valuable to lose — extended to meet the scale of what AI is about to make unprofitable. It is a recognition that profit is not some magical or moral concept that automatically leads to human thriving, but simply one component of an economic engine. And it is an evolution from a marketplace driven solely by profit to one counterbalanced by purpose.

But the purpose of an economy is not to create profit, it is to orchestrate human collaboration in ways that allow for more and greater expressions of human value. This is a schematic for a much better engine of the global economy that protects and preserves individual autonomy, while giving exponentially more people the freedom to become entrepreneurs and participants in localized, affordable, and re-diversified economies.

Try to imagine this world of artisanal everything. The majority of what you spend money on goes to small nonprofit businesses delivering exceptionally thoughtful, lovingly crafted goods and services. Chances are you yourself own or work for one of these specialized enterprises, niched down in a way that corporate scale could never allow for. It’s not enough to sound the alarm about what AI is about to do to the world of work. We have to see the future we want, and then build it. Nonprofits are evolved for this moment.

1. https://www.weforum.org/podcasts/meet-the-leader/episodes/davos-2026-jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-chase/#:~:text=Jamie%20Dimon%2C%20JPMorgan%20Chase%3A%20Have,the%20only%20way%20to%20do%20it.

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-anthropic-tools-saas-software-stocks-selloff.html