AI Exposure · Marketing and design
What Mailchimp actually does with your data
Your supporter mailing list lives here, and Mailchimp belongs to Intuit now, which means the same small print as QuickBooks covers it.
- Trains on your data
- Intuit's statement says yes
- Processed
- The US, and beyond
- Can you turn it off
- Feature by feature
- Verified
- 3 July 2026, against Intuit's published documents
What AI is in it?
- Write with AI. Generates subject lines, email copy and calls to action from a prompt, as part of Intuit Assist's rollout across Mailchimp.
- Predictive segmentation and send time optimisation. Machine learning over your subscribers' behaviour, who opens, who clicks, when, to predict who is most likely to engage and when to send. This is profiling your supporters, in the ordinary marketing sense of the word.
- Arriving by region. The newest Intuit Assist features reached US accounts on paid plans first, with the rollout continuing elsewhere. What your account has depends on plan and region, and it changes.
Does your data train AI models?
Intuit's statement says yes.
Mailchimp sits under Intuit's global privacy statement, the same one as QuickBooks, which says Intuit uses your information to improve and develop its products "by training our artificial intelligence models and other machine learning models". I have not found an opt out published alongside it.
The statement also allows Intuit to use "contact and purchase history details from Mailchimp" alongside data from its other products, its own words, so your supporter list should be thought of as living on the Intuit platform, not in a sealed Mailchimp box.
Where is your data processed?
The US, and beyond.
Intuit reserves the right to process personal information in the United States and in any country where it or its service providers operate, with standard contractual safeguards. Other vendors' sub-processor lists routinely record Mailchimp as US processing, which matches.
Assume your supporter list, names, emails and behaviour, is in the United States.
What changes between free and paid?
Paid plans first.
The generative AI features arrive on paid plans, US first. But the predictive machinery, segmentation and send time optimisation, has been part of Mailchimp for years across plans.
So if your charity sends newsletters through Mailchimp, your supporters are already being scored, whether or not anyone has touched a generative feature.
Can your organisation turn it off?
Feature by feature.
There is no single AI switch.
The realistic controls are choosing which features your team uses, being deliberate about what goes into AI prompts, and knowing that the predictive features work on your subscriber data by design. Worth one written question to Mailchimp support about opting out of model training.
What does this mean for the people you support?
A charity's mailing list is a list of real supporters, and sometimes service users, together with a behavioural record of how each of them responds to you.
Predictive segmentation means that record is being profiled to predict their behaviour. That can be perfectly lawful and useful, but your own privacy notice should say you do it, and most charity privacy notices were written before their email tool learned to predict.
What to check this week
- Check what your account already has. Look at which AI features are live in your Mailchimp, generative and predictive. Plan and region decide, and the rollout moves.
- Check your own privacy notice. If you use predictive segmentation or send time optimisation, you are profiling supporters. Make sure the privacy notice on your website actually says so, in plain words.
- Ask Intuit the training question once, for both products. If your charity also runs QuickBooks, one written question to Intuit covers the pair: is our data used to train your models, can we opt out, and does it flow between Intuit products?
Sources
Everything above is my plain English reading of what Intuit publishes. The originals:
- Mailchimp: AI marketing tools reviewed 3 July 2026
- Intuit: Global Privacy Statement (dated 9 March 2026) reviewed 3 July 2026
Vendors change these documents quietly and often. If you spot something out of date, email me and I'll re-verify the entry.
See your whole toolkit at once
This page covers one tool. The AI Exposure Report Generator covers your toolkit: tick the tools your charity uses and get one report showing what the AI inside each of them does with your data, as a Word document you can table at your next meeting. Free, and nothing you tick leaves your browser.
The Report Generator, start to finish: tick your tools, read your exposure, download the report.
Read the other tools
The same questions, answered for every tool in the directory.
Your office suite
Microsoft 365 Copilot
The AI inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. It can reach whatever the signed in person can reach.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Google Workspace with Gemini
Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, Drive and Meet. Google says your content is not used to train models outside your domain. What it can reach is the longer answer.
Verified 3 July 2026 →AI chatbots
ChatGPT
The one your staff are probably already using. What happens to what they type depends entirely on whose account it is.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Google Gemini
Google's chatbot, one tap away on Android phones, in Chrome and in search. On a personal account, the training switch is on until someone finds it.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Claude
Anthropic's chatbot. The same personal versus organisational story as the others, with the training question put to you as a setting.
Verified 2 July 2026 →Meeting notetakers
Otter.ai
The notetaker that joins your meetings, and can invite itself to the next one. What it hears may help train its AI.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Microsoft Teams
The meeting recorder your charity already owns. Everything it captures becomes a file in OneDrive and SharePoint, where the rest of the AI can reach it.
Verified 3 July 2026 →
Zoom AI Companion
The AI inside the video calls much of the sector runs on. Zoom's no training promise is unusually specific, and there is a reason it is worded that way.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Fathom
The free notetaker that arrives one personal install at a time. The recordings live in the US, and the training answer has two halves.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Charity CRMs
Beacon
A UK charity CRM with AI on every plan since 2024. Beacon publishes where your data sits and how to switch the AI off, which leaves one question to ask them directly.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Donorfy
A UK charity CRM where the AI mostly arrives through the side door: optional integrations. What you connect decides where your supporter data goes.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
CiviCRM
The open source CRM ships no AI of its own. What that is worth to you depends on which CiviCRM you are running: one your organisation hosts, or a hosted product somebody sells you. Everything below splits along that line.
Verified 20 July 2026 →
Salesforce
In much of the sector through ten free licences. The AI paperwork is detailed and mostly reassuring, with one default that runs the other way.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Accounts
Xero
Your accounts package now has an assistant called JAX. Xero says your data is not used to train its AI, and names the AI companies your questions travel to.
Verified 20 July 2026 →
QuickBooks
Intuit's accounts package now has an assistant throughout. Its privacy statement says your information is used to train its AI models, and it says so in as many words.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Marketing and design
Mailchimp
Your supporter mailing list lives here, and Mailchimp belongs to Intuit now, which means the same small print as QuickBooks covers it.
You are here
Canva
The design tool half the sector lives in, free through Canva for Nonprofits. Whether your uploads help train AI depends on whose account they sit in.
Verified 3 July 2026 →