Giving Compass' Take:

• Gideon Rosenblatt and Abhishek Gupta explore ways that AI is already being used by nonprofits and social enterprises to improve their impact, and how it can be used in the future. 

• How can philanthropy help nonprofits overcome the expense and experience barriers to adopting AI to improve their services? What are high-impact opportunities to implement AI?

• Find out why we need more women building AI.

With suicide prevention, every minute of response time matters. That’s why the technology team at the well-known nonprofit Crisis Text Line in New York City analyzed some 65 million text messages to determine what words were most statistically associated with a high risk of suicide. This scale of analysis would clearly be infeasible without some form of automated analysis, and its results surprised the team.

Use of the term “EMS” in a text, for example, is five times more predictive of a high risk of suicide than the actual word “suicide.” By using this analysis, the team can now better prioritize incoming messages, much like the triage system in a hospital emergency department. As a result, the organization is now able to respond to 94 percent of high-risk texters in fewer than five minutes.

This is just one example of “mission-driven artificial intelligence”—the responsible application of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve societal and ecological challenges. Sometimes dubbed “AI for good,” mission-driven AI is the use of machine-learning techniques to streamline operations and enhance programs at nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and social enterprises.

Read the full article about AI for good by Gideon Rosenblatt and Abhishek Gupta at Stanford Social Innovation Review.