AI in Grant Management: The Questions to Ask Before It Touches a Funding Decision

A governance-first look at AI in grant-making, written for the funders, trustees and grants officers who have to stand behind every decision. Written by Shane Collins, CRO at Submit.com, drawing on 13 years working inside the grant-making process alongside more than 40 local authorities across Ireland and the UK.

What’s Inside:

• Where AI actually touches a decision, and the data privacy and third-party exposure that follows when applicant information leaves the platform for an external model.
• What traceability really demands: a durable, reviewer-attributable audit trail that a trustee or statutory auditor can rely on, and why “human-in-the-loop” only counts when the review is enforced, not skippable under deadline pressure.
• The regulatory ground you stand on, in plain terms: GDPR Article 22 on automated decisions, the EU AI Act’s high-risk classification for public-assistance eligibility, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework that auditors increasingly point to.
• Six questions worth putting to any AI vendor, ours included, before you sign, from “is ‘we don’t train on your data’ actually contractual?” to “where exactly does AI touch the decision?”
• Where Submit.com stands today, stated plainly: no applicant, grantee or decision-related data is processed by AI on our platform, and how we’re building further AI capability on our own timeline rather than the market’s.