Nonprofits are training AI chatbot ‘employees’ to take over tasks that cause burnout and stress

Nonprofits often lack the funds to hire a well-staffed workforce to meet their mission – but that could soon change with new hires that don’t require a salary, thanks to AI.

A project that began in Pittsburgh to test AI assistants for nonprofits is now spreading across the state to Philly. The “employees” can take on tasks like answering basic questions and directing people to resources. 

The developers behind SkillBuilder.io, a custom AI chatbot program, found that leaders like Chanice Smith, chief programming officer for the Philly-based workforce nonprofit NoMo Foundation, may lack the money to hire a new resource. They’re willing to put in the time and effort to train an AI tool that can act as one, though, opening a new opportunity for help. 

“It’s virtually a free employee, but you have to be mindful that you have to equip them with the knowledge and train it,” Smith told Technical.ly. “But the one thing is that this employee doesn’t fizzle out.”

Adam Paulisick, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor and entrepreneur and Fred Brown, president and CEO of the Forbes Fund, debuted SkillBuilder.io in Pittsburgh last year, in hopes that AI employees could drastically increase underserved communities’ access to social services. 

“[Nonprofits] can’t be available 24/7,” Paulisick said. “If you think about the correlations between those that are looking for assistance and the availability for them to stop down to an office between nine and five, there’s an inherent limitation there.”

While SkillBuilder.io also serves other organizations, there’s an opportunity for major impact in the nonprofit space, the founders said. Nonprofits are the third largest industry behind retail and manufacturing, but the sector frequently struggles to recruit and retain employees. America has nearly 2 million nonprofit organizations staffed by approximately 12 million employees. 

Nearly 75% of nonprofits report job vacancies, with a majority of those positions being those that interact with the public, according to a 2023 report from the National Council of Nonprofits. Stress, burnout and insufficient funding were some of the reasons reported for the worker shortage. 

An emotionless, cheap AI employee can’t face those problems of stress, burnout or low pay, but it can perform the mundane tasks that can lead nonprofit workers to feel overworked and leave the industry. 

Customized training models let nonprofits tailor the results

The tech behind the AI employees was born from five years of applied research on ethical persuasion and influence at CMU. The research coincided with the rise of AI tools, which prompted Paulisick to create the SkillBuilder.io platform. 

SkillBuilder.io works differently than models like ChatGPT, but still takes little technical skill to use, according to Paulisick. 

ChatGPT is considered to be a generalist AI model, meaning it’s trained to handle a wide range of tasks and queries. In contrast, SkillBuilder.io was designed to adapt to organizations’ specific needs, and the tool works best when it’s treated like an actual employee, Paulisick said. 

Managers train the tool and onboard it just like they would with a new hire, to get it up to speed on organization specifics, according to Paulisick. Then, they can put it to work.

Syreeta Stanley, family stability manager at the tax services nonprofit Campaign for Working Families in Philly, set up the tool to answer questions that the org gets asked all the time, like what services it provides and how to sign up.

Stanley uploaded everything from job descriptions to grant reports into SkillBuilder.io so the AI had as much information as possible to pull from. She worked with the nonprofit’s call center to learn what the most frequently asked questions they get are and uploaded those and the responses into SkillBuilder.io as well. 

Stanley’s AI assistant Campy provides intake forms to potential clients and helps people book appointments, she said. 

“I’m only one person. I can’t answer the phone all day long,” Stanley said. “But if a person does go into the system and completes the intake form, now I have information on them, I can reach back out and see how to connect them to services.” 

While the AI tool can possess knowledge about an organization and information on how to execute tasks, it lacks the wisdom that social workers, program officers or community engagement managers require to do their jobs. 

It’s impossible to replace those roles, but the tech aims to free up their time to focus on other tasks, according to Paulisick.

“[The AI employee] allows prioritization for really capable subject matter experts or more experienced employees to focus on the strategic things that clearly humans are going to be in the lead for probably at least our lifetime, if not the next,” Paulisick said. 

Leaning into the AI takeover saves some orgs hours of work

Nonprofits can even use the tool to create multiple assistants that take on administrative and other tasks of several employees. 

Smith, from the NoMo Foundation, set up two AI assistants, Momo and Nomi. The first tool is targeted towards spreading general information about the nonprofit, in a way that’s relatable to its target demographic, at-risk youth and is accessible through public QR codes.

Her second AI assistant helps determine eligibility for NoMo’s programs. People can see if they qualify to participate in a program before showing up in person, she said. 

Smith approached the process for training the AI how she would an actual human employee, she said. She loaded about 60 documents into the program that included all the information she could think of about the organization. 

As AI becomes a more integrated part of society, industries including the nonprofit sector will have to find a way to keep up, notably by finding ways for it to multiply productivity.  

David Buck, executive director and founder of youth mentorship nonprofit Bridges of Opportunities, is the only person working at his nonprofit, so his AI assistant Bridgy is like his “wing person,” a resource that he can trust to answer common questions about the organization.

It also saves him hours doing tedious tasks like responding to emails and organizing his calendar, he said. 

“It’s important that small organizations like myself get this information so we could just make more of an impact and be able to drive within our missions,” Buck said. 

Even for nonprofits with bigger staffs, however, there are still limits on how much employees can be available. 

For Stanley from Campaign for Working Families, employees are only available from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. but the AI assistant can answer people’s questions any time of day. 

“It allows us to be able to extend services to those who are looking for organization-specific answers, where we’re not available,” Stanley said. 

A cost-effective option to handle the field’s uncertain future

AI employees aren’t completely taking over for real, live employees anytime soon. Fields like nonprofits are mostly relationship-based, so there will always be a need for human interaction, according to Smith from the NoMo Foundation. 

So, for now, SkillBuilder.io is deployed across organizations like nonprofits, government, software businesses and consulting companies, mostly to pick up work that’s tedious for humans to do, according to Paulisick. 

“It turns out that AI is just going to do a lot of stuff that people either don’t want to do today or are so over capacity that is, unfortunately, causing people to quit, burnout or not be able to focus,” Paulisick said.  

It could also help struggling organizations weather changes in funding, or other shifts, according to Brown. He hopes the tool is being deployed just in time for possible hardships in the business world, as a cost-effective way to get more work done.

“With today’s climate and the change in administrations, the human services sector might be under assault,” Brown said. “It definitely will not get the resources it got in the last administration.”

SkillBuilder.io is also looking to help organizations connect their communities to resources through an AI employee directory and make the employees more personalized.

The company is running a pilot program with the Pittsburgh Regional Transit Authority to distribute discounted or lower-cost bus passes to seniors who are a part of the SNAP program, according to Paulisick. 

Paulisick also predicted these AI employees could soon change to look and sound more like the communities they serve through the development of their personas and possibly more realistic 3D mascots that represent the AI employees. 

However, since the tech relies on the co-creation process between SkillBuilder.io and the organizations that use it, the future of the tool is in the hands of the users, Paulisick said. 

“Leading-edge technology can only move at the speed of trust,” Paulisick said. “What will define the future of AI is how we retain humanity and lead with humanity.”