AI in Action

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly moving from a theoretical concept to a practical tool that is reshaping the operational landscape of mission-driven organizations. This summary provides an overview of current and emerging AI applications across nonprofits, governments, and NGOs, illustrated by real-world case studies.

Generative AI & Natural Language Processing Use Cases

Organization: Community Counseling Solutions (CCS)
Goal: Reduce administrative overhead for mental health staff to free up time for direct care and grant seeking.
AI Application: CCS integrated Microsoft 365 Copilot (Generative AI) securely into their internal systems, allowing staff to query the AI to locate specific organizational knowledge, summarize compliance documents, and find patient resources instantly.
Outcome: The AI summarizes transcribed team meetings and automatically generates action items, saving hours of manual work. Additionally, the grants team uses the tool to draft grant narratives based on RFPs and internal data, turning a days-long writing process into a few hours of editing.
Organization: Amnesty International
Goal: Quantify the scale of online abuse against women to support advocacy campaigns.
AI Application: The "Troll Patrol" project utilized a human-in-the-loop NLP model. Volunteers classified a sample dataset of tweets, which was then used to train an AI to analyze millions of tweets, which was a scale impossible for the team to review manually.
Outcome: The project produced irrefutable, data-driven evidence that female politicians and journalists receive abusive tweets every 30 seconds. This specific, segmented data formed the backbone of a successful campaign to hold social media platforms more accountable.
Organization: Feeding America
Goal: Move beyond "one-size-fits-all" emails to increase donor engagement and revenue.
AI Application: Feeding America leverages Generative AI to scale their A/B testing. The marketing team uses AI to draft multiple "story leads" and subject lines tailored to different donor segments based on location and past engagement.
Outcome: The AI acts as a creative partner, allowing the team to run tests at a speed and scale previously impossible. This resulted in highly resonant content that speaks to local needs, driving higher open rates and more effective fundraising.
Organization: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Goal: Efficiently process hundreds of thousands of public comments on new regulations.
AI Application: To manage the bottleneck of manual reading, HHS employs NLP tools for topic modeling (identifying themes like 'cost' or 'privacy') and sentiment analysis (gauging positive or negative reactions).
Outcome: This process reduced a review task that historically took months down to a matter of days. It ensures that policymakers understand the full spectrum of public concern (not just the loudest voices) making the public comment period more efficient and democratic.
Organization: California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
Goal: Reduce call center congestion and wait times for routine inquiries.
AI Application: The DMV deployed an NLP-powered virtual assistant trained on state regulations. Unlike basic chatbots, it understands complex, conversational phrasing (e.g., "I'm out of state and my license expired") and provides accurate, multi-step guidance.
Outcome: The assistant resolves millions of inquiries annually without human intervention. This allows human agents to focus on complex legal cases and drastically reduces wait times for all citizens.

Predictive AI Use Cases

Organization: Greenpeace Australia Pacific
Goal: Increase donation revenue while reducing printing costs and "donor fatigue."
AI Application: Greenpeace utilized propensity modeling to analyze historical donor data. The model scanned hundreds of variables, including giving frequency, responsiveness to specific topics (e.g., climate vs. forests), and engagement history, to assign a "likelihood to give" score to every contact for specific appeals.
Outcome: By targeting high-propensity donors, they achieved a 15-to-1 return on investment. This strategy allowed them to send significantly fewer mailers (saving costs) while raising more money. It improved long-term retention by ensuring donors weren't spammed with irrelevant appeals.
Organization: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
Goal: Proactively identify veterans at high risk of suicide to intervene before a crisis occurs.
AI Application: The VA deployed REACH VET, a predictive model that analyzes electronic health records (EHRs). It evaluates factors such as medication history, missed appointments, and diagnoses to identify veterans with the highest statistical risk of suicide in the upcoming month, even if they haven't explicitly asked for help.
Outcome: The system generates a risk score that triggers immediate, proactive outreach from clinical teams. This allows the VA to focus intensive mental health resources on the specific individuals who need them most, shifting the model from reactive treatment to preventative care.
Learn more
Organization: Chicago Department of Public Health
Goal: Optimize the deployment of a limited team of food inspectors to prevent food borne illness.
AI Application: The city built a predictive model to forecast which restaurants were likely to have critical violations. The model aggregated diverse data points, including past violations, 311 complaints (e.g., "garbage"), business license types, and even local weather patterns since heat impacts food storage.
Outcome: The model generates a daily risk score for over 15,000 food establishments. This data-driven prioritization helped inspectors catch critical violations an average of seven days earlier than traditional scheduling, directly improving public safety by dispatching inspectors to "hot spots" first.
Learn more
Organization: Georgia State University (GSU)
Goal: Increase graduation rates and close the achievement gap by identifying struggling students early.
AI Application: GSU implemented a predictive analytics system tracking over 800 risk factors. The system monitors academic markers (like grades in gateway courses) and behavioral data (such as logging into the Learning Management System or registering late). It flags at-risk students in real-time, long before their GPA suffers.
Outcome: Daily alerts are sent to academic advisors, prompting immediate, supportive outreach. This intervention strategy is credited with significantly raising GSU's graduation rates and, notably, helping to eliminate the achievement gap between students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Learn more
Organization: Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
Goal: Maximize the impact of limited ranger patrols to protect endangered species from poaching.
AI Application: WCS utilizes PAWS (Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security), a predictive model that ingests data on past poaching incidents, terrain, and animal movement. The AI generates dynamic "risk maps" that predict where poachers are statistically most likely to strike next.
Outcome: Instead of patrolling randomly across vast wildernesses, rangers are directed to specific, high-probability zones. This targeted approach has increased the detection of snares and traps, creating a stronger deterrent and making a small team effective over a massive geographic area.
Learn more

Agentic AI Use Cases

Organization: Proactive Donor Journey Management
Goal: Increase the recurring donor conversion rate by managing every donor's journey.
AI Application: A director provides an AI agent with a high-level goal, such as: "Monitor all mid-level donors and take action to seek a second gift."
Autonomous Execution: The agent autonomously handles the full sequence:
- Observation (donor gave 45 days ago)
- Planning (draft personalized email)
- Action (GenAI) (draft and send the email with specific project details)
- Adaptation (If the donor clicks, schedule a follow-up for a human; if not, initiate a social media retargeting ad).
Outcome: The agent acts as a force-multiplier, autonomously managing hundreds of personalized journeys simultaneously. This ensures no engaged donor "falls through the cracks," increasing efficiency and maximizing fundraising potential.
Organization: Brazil's "NoHarm" Prescription Monitoring Agent
Goal: Proactively prevent adverse drug events (e.g., incorrect dosages) in public hospitals.
AI Application: The NoHarm platform is an autonomous agent integrated with the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, focused on continuous safety monitoring.
Autonomous Execution: The agent's goal is to continuously monitor all new prescriptions and flag any potential patient safety risks. It instantly analyzes a new prescription against the patient's full history (lab results, allergies, weight). It then decides if a risk exists (e.g., dangerous dosage for a patient with low kidney function) and takes action by sending an immediate, critical alert to the pharmacist's dashboard with a clear, corrective explanation.
Outcome: The agent works 24/7, analyzing millions of prescriptions to prevent harm in real-time. This allows a single pharmacist to effectively monitor hundreds of patients at once, catching critical errors before they can reach the patient.
Organization: City of San Jose
Goal: Proactively enroll eligible low-income residents in cost-saving programs (e.g., discounted utilities or broadband).
AI Application: San Jose uses an agentic system that analyzes existing (anonymized) city data to identify residents who qualify for programs but are not yet enrolled.
Autonomous Execution: The system doesn't wait for a citizen application. It plans a personalized communication strategy and acts by proactively sending targeted outreach (e.g., a text message) that includes a pre-filled application.

Computer Vision Use Cases

Organization: Xcel Energy
Goal: Proactively detect and mitigate wildfire risk in high-threat areas to protect infrastructure, property, and public safety.
AI Application: Xcel utilizes high-resolution video camera systems placed in vulnerable locations, particularly in the foothills and mountains. CV models analyze these live video feeds 24/7. The AI is trained to detect two primary visual anomalies:
- Smoke Plume Detection: Identifying the characteristic appearance and movement of smoke plumes, before they are noticed by human observers or fire reports.
- Vegetation/Infrastructure Encroachment: Monitoring power lines and substations to detect if nearby trees, branches, or foreign objects pose an immediate threat or violate safety clearance zones.
Outcome: The system provides real-time, location-specific alerts to Xcel's operations center, often detecting fires minutes after they start. This critical early warning capability allows the company to rapidly deploy crews, de-energize lines strategically, and coordinate with fire suppression agencies, drastically reducing response times and minimizing the risk of a catastrophic event.
Learn more
Organization: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Goal: More effectively screen cargo and intercept illegal goods.
AI Application: CBP uses AI to analyze vehicle and cargo-scanning X-ray images at ports of entry. The models are trained on millions of past scans, learning to identify anomalies. The AI can detect hidden compartments in vehicles, unusual densities in cargo containers, or shapes that match a weapons-threat library, flagging them for human operators.
Outcome: The system acts as a "second pair of eyes" that never gets tired. It flags high-risk containers for secondary inspection, dramatically increasing the "hit rate" for finding illegal goods while speeding up the flow of legitimate trade by quickly clearing low-risk cargo.
Organization: Transport for London (TfL)
Goal: Improve accessibility and compliance for people with disabilities on the transit network.
AI Application: CV models analyze video feeds from station platforms and train interiors. The AI is trained to detect specific events such as a person falling onto the tracks, objects left unattended, or, most relevantly, non-compliance in priority seating (e.g., people using priority seats who do not appear to need them, or people blocking wheelchair access ramps).
Outcome: The system provides real-time alerts to station staff, allowing them to intervene immediately to assist a person who has fallen, remove a hazardous object, or ensure priority areas remain clear. This proactive monitoring enhances safety and ensures that accessibility standards are consistently met across a vast, complex public network, improving the travel experience for vulnerable citizens.

Advanced Robotics & Automation Use Cases

Organization: The International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC)
Goal: Rapidly sort, pack, and deploy critical supplies (food, medicine, shelter kits) from global logistics hubs during large-scale disasters.
AI Application: The IFRC utilizes an AI-powered warehouse management system to coordinate Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs). When a field request is received, the AI calculates the most efficient picking path, optimally coordinates robot traffic (de-confliction), and dispatches AMRs to retrieve supplies and bring them to human packing stations in the correct sequence.
Outcome: Used in massive hubs like the one in Dubai, this system reduces the time required for supply sorting and packing from days to hours. It ensures 24/7 operation and dramatically increases order accuracy, freeing up human volunteers to focus on complex logistics and direct field deployment.
Organization: North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT)
Goal: Inspect bridges for safety hazards (cracks, fatigue) while enhancing staff safety and minimizing traffic disruption.
AI Application: NCDOT integrates autonomous drones into its inspection workflow. The drone is programmed with a flight path and uses on-board Computer Vision to navigate and capture thousands of high-resolution images. An AI model then analyzes these images to automatically detect, measure, and flag defects (like hairline cracks), mapping them onto a 3D digital model of the bridge.
Outcome: Inspections are completed in a fraction of the time and are inherently safer for staff (who avoid complex rigging over traffic). The high-precision AI can detect and track tiny defects a human might miss, enabling a critical shift to proactive, condition-based maintenance.
Learn more
Organization: Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA)
Goal: Increase the time nurses and clinical staff spend on direct patient care by automating the non-clinical transport of supplies, medication, and waste across the large hospital campus.
AI Application: CHOA operates one of the world's largest hospital robot fleets, utilizing dozens of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) (such as the TUG robot by Aethon). These robots are integrated into the hospital's central management system, using AI-based mapping to navigate multi-floor environments, open doors, and call elevators. The robots autonomously transport meals, linens, supplies, medications, and biohazard waste 24/7.
Outcome: The system automates the physically demanding and repetitive logistical tasks, completing tens of thousands of deliveries annually. This frees up nurses and technicians to redirect their time and expertise back to patient needs, directly improving clinical focus and efficiency across the entire healthcare system.
Learn more

The Future is Now

These case studies confirm that the adoption of AI across public and private mission-driven organizations is not merely an acceleration of trends but a fundamental shift in mindsets and capabilities. AI is moving beyond simple software to become a force-multiplier.

In every instance, the common thread is not the replacement of human effort, but the strategic enhancement of human impact. These organizations are leveraging AI to eliminate bottlenecks, scale empathy, and achieve their missions with unprecedented speed and precision.

Read the full report for more.