Bridging Gaps with AI: How Good360 and Salesforce Empower Nonprofits

Speaker A: Anyway, so exciting. All right, all right. So Stefan, um, Stefan or Stefan.

Speaker B: Stefan.

Speaker A: I've been calling you Stefan all day. And I literally just saw it, the E and it threw me.

Speaker B: You were doing it. Right.

Speaker A: So chief technology officer at Good360. I think a good place for us to start. What is good 360?

Speaker B: Let's start there. Uh, so good 360 is a, uh, nonprofit organization. We're based, headquartered in northern Virginia, right outside Washington with a warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska and a warehouse in, uh, little south of Cincinnati in Kentucky. Uh, what do we do is to explain it. I think we start from a paradox that every year in the US there's about 6 million pounds of product that is new or never used that goes straight to a landfill. So it got manufactured somewhere in the world, got into build its own carbon footprint to get to us and ends up as pollution. Uh, and yet on the other side of the US we have about 40% of the household who cannot close their moss comfortably, cannot access those products if they wanted to. What if somebody was taking those products and getting it in their hands? That's what good 360 does through other nonprofits. So we're kind of the middleman. The things see us as like the big trucks on the highway and our members are the last mile because they know their community and their needs better than we do. So we partner with large corporations. Amazon, Nike can be quoted. Uh, and then we redistribute these products in boxes. Pallets, trucks, multiple trucks. A scale around that. Uh, if you were to put a value on the product. In 2023, we distributed about $3 billion worth of product.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: So 125/million pounds of product. More importantly, we evaluated that it's 25 million people who got touched in one way or another.

Speaker A: How many lives were impacted?

Speaker B: 25 million.

Speaker A: Wow. Amazing. So you're actually doing good work. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Um, so we're here at the Salesforce agentforce New York City Javis Center. How do you guys partner with Salesforce?

Speaker B: All right, good question. Do you want to tap in Amy or. So I'll start it and I'll.

Speaker C: I'll.

Speaker B: Amy can give you the details. Is we, we were lucky enough to. We applied for the Salesforce, uh, AI accelerator.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: We were lucky enough to be selected for that. And that, that's really how we got involved in the, in the AI aspect of Salesforce. The agent for us yet called copilot at the time.

Speaker A: And what year was that? When was that?

Speaker B: Uh, oh, that was, uh, this year, 2024.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: We're in this year's cohort and uh, I'll tap Amy to tell you a lot more about that.

Speaker C: Sure. I could just say quickly. So we, um, launched a program called AI for Impact. And the goal was to help nonprofits who have innovative ideas for AI and agents to have the opportunity to use technology grant funds as well as pro bono support to help them de risk their innov innovative solutions. So a lot of times nonprofits don't have the resources to take that risk to spend the time or the money on exploring new tech. And we wanted to make sure in this AI revolution and with agents in particular, we were being really intentional about infusing the non profit sector with those resources. So Stefan and Good360 is one of five climate organizations in this cohort and we ran one last year, had six, uh, education organizations participate.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.

Speaker C: Ah, yeah.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for sharing that. So how does Salesforce actually help along with this process? Salesforce and AI, I guess. How does it help change the lives of 25 million people?

Speaker B: Okay. Uh, it would help because it's going to change more people's lives, which is really where we want to go. Uh, so currently we're in the nonprofit cloud, where we're migrating from, I would say traditional Salesforce, your sales and service cloud, into the nonprofit cloud. In parallel to that AI came along, uh, what's it going to do for us is by as a company, we have the goal at the end of 2026 to go from 25 million people impacted to 40 million people impacted. 40 million is kind of a symbolic number. We know they're not going to be those people. There are roughly 40 million Americans below poverty level. So that's where the symbol.

Speaker A: We're trying to get everyone out and

Speaker B: we're trying to touch at least that number of people. Because if you're slightly above the poverty level, you're still not in a good place.

Speaker A: I know.

Speaker B: So if we touch 40 million people, we know they're deserving people who need the help. Um, we're uh, good360. As a business, we place $3 billion worth of product, but we're about a 35 million dollar business with 90 employees. So it's very effective ratio. Uh, we know we can't scale up our people to meet. So if you look at that 40 million lives and you back it up into numbers, that's about £230 million of products and $4.5 billion worth of value.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: To Scale that way up. We need some help people which may not get old technology which.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: So the idea of the agent is really to assist those people. We're not looking at agentic agents just yet who would make the decisions. We're looking at assisting agents.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: For a couple of reasons. One, we want to trial the technology. And our first agent is an internal agent. So we're trying it on us first. We have big plans to have public agents down the road. Uh, so that first agent will be assistant agent internal.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: To help us when a donation comes in. The current process would be. What is that donation? Where is it located? Where do I place it? What is the right candidate? Reports, downloads, Excel spreadsheets, manual analysis. How do we help people? And on top of being a tedious work, it requires certain skills. You have to know how to run a report. You have to know how to change filters on a report. Anyone can chat, right?

Speaker A: That's true.

Speaker B: Anyone can text.

Speaker A: I love that. I think I saw a demo that maybe you or someone from your team did on YouTube that showcases how this internal agent works. Yes. Um, talk to us about how easy was it to set up your internal agent.

Speaker B: Okay, so the reality of that agent, as much as we'd like to hear it, can be done in 15 minutes. Yes, can be done. Uh, realistically and again, in partnership between great folks in the accelerator program, I'm not going to say anything good stuff about the team we work with. Uh, I mean, we're talking solution engineers. We're talking like really skilled internal salesforce staff partner with a. We have a salesforce partner, like an SI who's helping us roll that out.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Nobody's, uh, really a pro at agent force yet, but they really invested time and effort in that project. Uh, it took us about two months to really get that agent to a point where it was something we can trial. Uh, the stage we're at now is we're still in the sandbox stage. We're going live, we expect, by Q1 of next year, 2025.

Speaker A: Oh, okay. It's happening fast.

Speaker B: It's there.

Speaker A: So it only took two months. I think that's great. Uh, we just wanted to ask, what advice do you have for other. Let's just focus on nonprofits for now who want to maybe start with an internal agent.

Speaker B: Well, one thing I would say that in my experience, one thing that took us some time to get in. What are we going to do with that agent? M. The change of mindset that it took was really saying, I'M not really building an IT solution like your decision trees. And what am I building and what are the steps that the process will take? Put some trust in the agent and look at the agent as being somebody you're onboarding, like you're hiring a new employee. When you hire someone, you say, well, here are your resources. Here's what you're allowed to do. If that falls out of that scope, talk to your boss.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, topics, actions, escalation.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly.

Speaker B: And once, uh, you look at it that way, an agent is a lot easier to define as a business process. And then you're back in it with business process, with technical requirements, and you're back in your IT world, basically.

Speaker A: I think Amy will.

Speaker C: I think. I love that analogy that you gave. And I think another thing I've heard, I've seen you do and I've seen other organizations do, is really navigate the change process well internally. Like, there is fear around what will happen if AI is introduced and agents introduced for my job. And I think you've done a really great job at bringing in experts to do lunch and learns to help the rest of the team kind of understand the role of AI in the organization, which then, as they're rolling out these new tools, helps people understand the role and the format of this new teammate, uh, to use your own analogy, and pulled off that.

Speaker A: All right, thank you. Thank you so much. By the way, Mignon, any questions, just feel free to want to ask. Go ahead.

Speaker C: You had something.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: But then I do.

Speaker A: Okay. I just want to make sure. So you mentioned that you want to start rolling out, um, your internal AI agent more fully in Q1 of 2025. What are the plans for beyond that?

Speaker B: Okay, well, there's a few plans. Uh, Some of it, we kind of know we're doing it. Some of them are aspirational. I'll give you two. One, uh, is we get a breadth of donations across the scope, across the board of everything. We get every single product you can think of. Uh, and we're trying to get more into fundraising. And how do we sponsor. Our model is admin fee based. So the nonprofit don't get the product for free. They get it for extremely cheap. Extremely cheap is still too much for some of them. How do we sponsor some of that? With funding money. When we approach a foundation, they all have some kind of an angle. Uh, they do education work, they do hygiene, and whatever their angle their mission is, we have an impact in that area. How do we express it to them in their term? We can Say, hey, we distributed $3 billion worth of product. 200 million is actually very relevant to what you're doing.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, and how do we explain that? And how can we have an agent that will help us saying, kind of sift through this massive treasure trove of data to say, for that specific foundation instead of building like a BI that's going to be kind of traditional bi. What is the dimension? What do we want to show? What is the impact area we want to forecast? Let the agent try to figure it out and give us data on the fly, kind of. That would be awesome to get that off the ground. Uh, have you.

Speaker A: Have you started that process yet?

Speaker B: Um, concept.

Speaker D: Okay, one.

Speaker A: That

Speaker B: a little bit. No. Yeah, please.

Speaker D: This rose. We have started a few things. Uh, we're, um, working on our plan for next year and just pulling in everything. But like Amy said, it's a lot of, um. I think that when we first started the cohort, they said it's 90 culture, 10% technology. And so, um, I think, like, for us, we have to catch up in our organization to say, okay, this is what we need to do. Um, and I think that folks are pretty on board with it. Um, and then we can roll out our, um, plan to say, okay, we're going to, um, launch these new agents for you and, um, all of that. So I think I.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for bringing that up. That was actually my final question was how. How is the team feeling about this? Because there's this fear AI is going to take my job now. Agents are literally so good they can't take people's jobs. So are folks typically welcome to the idea on the team?

Speaker B: Well, I think one, we're for one of that. That's one of the reasons we decided to go with an assistive agent, not a Gentec agent, is tell people it's here to help. It's not here to replace what you're doing. It's here to kind of the way I like to phrase it, is to remove the noise. I mean, we interview someone to work at go360, say, why do you want to work here? Their answer is, I want to help people. I want to do good. Nobody ever applied and says, I want to sift through a ton of Excel spreadsheets. I like to download queries from your other ERP system. I really enjoy that. That's what I want to do. Uh, and the agent kind of removed that complexity. And even what I would say is that the mindset, the way you communicate with an agent, in plain English, it Keeps your mind on, um, solving the problem. It sounds simple, but it's. You're trying to find, you know, where do I put that donation? Oh, uh, by the way, how do I change the filter on that thing? Because they're not in California. They're in Ohio. Uh, how do I change the state? I don't remember. Now you've lost track of what you're doing, and you're adding time to getting that product out of the door.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: If you can say, show me every nonprofit in Ohio that could receive a donation and the disaster recovery space.

Speaker C: Boom.

Speaker B: And anybody can do that.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: And it keeps your mind in focus. You're. You're fulfilled by saying, hey, I actually made a difference. I didn't download stuff.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.

Speaker D: And I just want to iterate to what Amy said before. Um, getting the tools, doing the, um, the lunch and learns that we have done. Um, I think that it's all about building a trust so that folks can understand, because with new technology, there's going to come, like, some fear around it. Um, we hear things in the news all the time, but I think that, um, Salesforce has built up such a good foundation to kind of get folks on board, like, with their human, um, uh, AI impact and like, the things that they're doing to safeguard the products on the back end. And so I think that once we have shown our team, like, hey, these are the things that we can do, and this is how there are some safeguards. Um, now let's move forward to the next step. And then all about getting excited. Look, I'm an excited person, so, you know, just putting that excitement and, and putting it into everyday life things. Because, I mean, everything has. It's now AI, AI, AI. Everything has been about AI. And I think that Salesforce has been amazing with doing it the right way, um, and, you know, um, prepping us and, um, building a tool that many folks can use. And it's local too, so anyone who wants to learn can just say, oh, well, can we see how that works? And so I think that that is going to be so helpful for nonprofits specifically who may be strapped for funds and, um, you know, have small team members so that they can, like, um, scale up and amplify their mission.

Speaker B: So I think that that's a really good point, Ashana. It's one of the things that if people have really serious doubts, and I would say that the higher you go in the executive chain, some executive have some doubts, you really have to prove your case. Showing the back end of the Salesforce Agent is something you can still show to someone who doesn't know technology and it still kind of makes sense. And uh, I'll compare two experiences. I went to a conference with another vendor, which I'll not rebuild here, and they said, oh, our AI is super easy to use. And here's, you know, we're going to do a workshop. Here's a laptop, here's a code editor. We've preloaded three scripts for you and we're going to show you how you can change them to run your AI. Okay, that's great. And then you go to Salesforce. One is, oh, click here, drag this, type your prompt. I'm like, okay, that I can do. She can do both. I can only do the second one.

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, I think it's easy enough. You could still show it so it's not like a black box where it's like, oh, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes.

Speaker B: And the fact that you see the reasoning, you can run your own query and you can see the reasoning of that agent, that's pretty powerful.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: That's a big doubt that people always talk about, like ChatGPT. I ask a question, I get a great answer. How did you get there? I can't tell you. It's proprietary.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker D: That's why it's important for us too, to be able to see your prompts, to be able to see your agent on the back end is important, especially for us. Like when we get into disaster. Say we built an agent for disaster, uh, Milton. But we need a different type of agent for another one. We can just go in and change out the things that we need and then it's, it's active for the next disaster. So I think what Stephan said is like really true and like that's how we can scale up and work quicker in a more quick way.

Speaker A: How has the, how is the implementation process and the training from Salesforce helped you team? Kind of walk me through that. Yeah.

Speaker D: Um, it's been amazing. Um, so from the first sessions, we would have, um, group, um, sessions with all the other folks that Amy mentioned in the cohort. And then we would have, every Monday we would have a breakout session with just our pro bono team and our Salesforce team. And so they kind of help us to um, make the product smaller than what folks are making it to be. So we were able to go in and say, oh, okay, our date, the data that we do have actually can work for this, this product. The um, time that we need, um, it can work for this, this product. And um, also like the team was amazing. Like they're very knowledgeable and that's a good thing too. Like everybody's learning the same. Like they just rolled out Agent Force September and then we worked fast to have a working product. And so I think that because everyone is so willing to learn and like really like passionate about this product, it helps us to kind of get into that mindset that we actually can do this and this is actually useful for us and to think about our non profits again and say this tool can help our non profits. We can get time back, we can like start doing, doing the work that we need to do and not be bogged down. Because honestly I feel that um, since COVID like we still have been trying to get back uh, up on our feet and like, you know, just get the resources that we need to be able to help our communities and we want to make sure that we're still like that human touch. I think that the, the program has really helped us to kind of like, well, at least me specifically to take a step, step back and see our purpose and like this is why we're here and like to be like excited, like this is going to help us get back to our purpose and get more time.

Speaker C: I was just going to add, um, you said it perfectly. I was just going to add a little bit of sort of like macro context on the program that she's talking about. So one of the parts of the accelerator that we offer is a team of pro bono volunteers. So you probably know Salesforce is funded and founded on our one, one one model, which is 1% of our time, 1% of our tech and 1% of our equity. So that's what inspired the accelerator program to offer this trifecta of resources. And within the pro bono program, it's a six month sort uh, of consultative process that walks each organization through, um, all the steps they need to go through in order to realize their AI and agent vision, um, through to a demo or a prototype. And so they're working with a project manager, a solution architect, a technical architect and a UX designer to help sort of unpack what their problem is they're facing and the best way the technology can come together to support them. So that, just to add a little background of what's happening across the program.

Speaker A: Thank you. So, um, Stephan, any last words before my final, final question? I know we're almost out of time.

Speaker B: Do you have final, final question?

Speaker A: I do. So for people who want to be gun do Good. Is there a place they can go to donate? Learn more.

Speaker B: Oh, for us?

Speaker A: Uh, for you. Yeah.

Speaker B: Our website, uh, good360.org you can learn about what we do, how we do it, and then learn about the mission, the why we're really doing what we're doing. It's not about moving products, about helping the people with product. Uh, so, yeah, good360.org there's a donate button. We take any kind of donations. Product. Product is for corporations. We don't do personal product. Personal product. Uh, but anybody can help us financially, and we're very thankful to anybody who does that.

Speaker A: Awesome. And we're very thankful to have a chance to talk to you also. Thank you so much.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker D: Thanks.

Speaker A: So when I include it in the article.