Benevity hires first Chief AI Officer

Author Sharlene Gandhi
Ian Goldsmith is tasked with embedding AI into Benevity’s product lines, which include volunteer and donor management, and grant-making software.

Why It Matters

As an impact and employee engagement platform, Benevity targets corporations and their CSR teams. The platform has amassed a significant amount of data through its products, which it can use to train machine learning algorithms.

Based in California and with an extensive background in product management, Ian Goldsmith has been named Benevity’s new – and first – Chief AI Officer (Karen Vaisman Photography / Supplied)

 

Calgary-headquartered Benevity, which develops software to help companies manage donations, volunteerism and grantmaking, has hired its first Chief AI Officer. 

Ian Goldsmith, who has a background in product management, will be aiming to embed AI into several of Benevity’s software products. 

Benevity connects non-profits with companies with an impact strategy, including workplace giving, donation, volunteering and granting programs. 

Over time, Benevity’s software products have generated a wealth of data about the non-profit sector and successful campaigns, Goldsmith said. This data is key to developing machine learning models and artificial intelligence. 

Goldsmith’s ambition is to embed AI into Benevity’s products, covering a range of use cases. Customer support staff are already using AI technologies to supplement their work, he said. 

Benevity will soon be ready to roll out a recommendation engine fuelled by AI, Goldsmith said: “in the same way that Netflix tells you which movie you should watch next, our platform can now tell you what kind of causes you should be looking to donate to next, based on your prior activity and similarity suggestion models.”

Learning from prior success data 

Goldsmith is already looking to build Benevity’s internal AI team, with new roles based in Toronto.

One case study he is particularly interested in is being able to support the grant-writing process with AI. 

“It’s unlikely that that will ever become an entirely machine-oriented business,” Goldsmith said.  

“You can see a potential long-term vision where AI writes a grant application and a foundation uses AI to evaluate the application, and then chooses to fund. That is never going to happen without significant amounts of humans in the loop.”

Machine learning can also find patterns among the most successful campaigns, and that information can be plugged into generative AI to draft and create new campaign content. 

Goldsmith’s focus is primarily on Benevity’s corporate clients, but said that non-profits will be engaged as these AI capabilities are rolled out. 

“We’re not going to roll [features] out in a vacuum,” he said. “Myself and my team will spend time with non-profits, socializing the way the features are developed and created.”

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  • Sharlene Gandhi is the Future of Good editorial fellow on digital transformation.

    Sharlene has been reporting on responsible business, environmental sustainability and technology in the UK and Canada since 2018. She has worked with various organizations during this time, including the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University, AIGA Eye on Design, Social Enterprise UK and Nature is a Human Right. Sharlene moved to Toronto in early 2023 to join the Future of Good team, where she has been reporting at the intersections of technology, data and social purpose work. Her reporting has spanned several subject areas, including AI policy, cybersecurity, ethical data collection, and technology partnerships between the private, public and third sectors.

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