What Salesforce’s AI agents can do for nonprofits

With Agentforce Nonprofit, Salesforce has expanded its agentic AI into its biggest vertical.

Although numbers vary depending on the source, Salesforce's own reported numbers indicate that approximately one-third of its 150,000 customers are nonprofits. Those organizations typically don't have the IT personnel or budget for the most sophisticated Salesforce instances.

Agentic AI automations could eventually help such typically short-staffed groups accomplish more with less in a hardscrabble funding landscape.

"The demand for their services is going way up, but the competition for funds is getting greater," said Lori Freeman, global general manager for nonprofits at Salesforce. "Giving patterns generally -- there's some exceptions to this -- over the last couple decades have kind of stayed flat or went down or up [only] by one or two percentage points."

The AI implementation challenge many nonprofits have is understanding their processes and determining which ones are suited for agents, Freeman said.

"In my experience, the valley of despair -- the frustrating, challenging parts for a lot of the organizations that we work with -- is that processes aren't documented, and it's not well understood where all of your data is."

To that end, early adopter America On Tech developed targeted use cases before it began working with AI agents, said Jessica Santana, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit that prepares students age 16-24 in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta for tech careers.

The first agent the nonprofit deployed looks up data for funder reports.

"All of our partners have different reporting templates. Some of them want national data, some of them want hyperlocal data, and we only have one data manager on staff…" Santana said. "Developing thousands of dashboards to have this level of customization for each funder would have been a lot. The chatbot is the tool we developed to be able to query data on demand."

America On Tech's grant-reporting agent can look up data, which it can also put into charts and graphs. That agent has reduced the time required to fulfill specific data requests for different grants from three days to an hour.

"It's enabling us to do less data crunching and more data storytelling," Santana said, adding that America On Tech is considering an applications and admissions agent to streamline the process of ingesting the thousands of applications the group receives annually.

While America On Tech built its own custom agent, Agentforce Nonprofit will also eventually have prebuilt agents that tackle tasks common to most nonprofits, which can then be shaped to individual workflows:

• Prospect Research, which preps for funder meetings in Slack based on CRM data, is available today; Slack support is coming next summer.
• Participant Management, an agent-assist tool for case managers that can summarize call notes and make recommendations based on CRM data and conversation flow, is available today, with summaries coming next summer.
• Volunteer Capacity & Coverage, a workforce management tool for coordinators, is in beta.
• Donor Support, a self-service tool for nonprofit donors, will be in beta next spring.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.