IBM Data and AI for Social Impact - watsonx.ai Workshop in Atlanta
February 2024
The Workshop
IBM Client Engineering recently conducted a two-day workshop bringing together nonprofit organizations dedicated to addressing poverty, hunger, and homelessness in the Atlanta region.
Leveraging IBM’s latest technology, watsonx, IBM designers and AI engineers worked with each nonprofit to explore opportunities, address pain points or enhance the delivery of service to those with pressing needs in our community. The immersive in-person experience enabled knowledge sharing among local nonprofit organizations and fostered co-creation between IBM experts and participants.
The Goals
The overarching goal of such workshops is to make IBM AI technology more accessible to the social sector and to help them advance their social impact missions. It also serves as an opportunity for participants to learn about data strategy, generative AI and ethical AI from IBM experts.
The Agenda
The two-day workshop was divided into two main themes - day 1 was centered around discovery and design thinking and day 2 was focused on technology deep dive and MVP scoping.
This allowed IBM to learn about the organizations’ challenges, the organizations to learn about IBM technology, and for everyone to leverage that shared foundation to ideate on some exciting AI use cases.
The Organizations
Pebble Tossers, Inc.: Pebble Tossers is a youth development nonprofit with a mission to empower and equip youth to lead through service.
Open Hand Atlanta: Open Hand prepares, packs and delivers nearly 5,000 health-promoting meals each day throughout metro-Atlanta to thousands of friends and neighbors who are home-bound, disabled or simply too sick to prepare their own meals.
The Outcomes
Over the course of the first day, these organizations ideated over 18 ways to use data & AI. Following successful ideation from day 1, each organization had the difficult task of narrowing down 1 idea to focus on for day 2. On day 2, the organizations learned about IBM’s technology stack through curated content and dedicated hands-on sessions alongside IBM’s AI engineers.
By the end of the workshop, both organization solutioned, scoped, and presented 1 use case they felt passionate about advocating for with their leadership and funders. They were even able to prototype and demo a functional asset built around their use case and data!
WATCH: Open Hand Atlanta's Use Case + watsonx Assistant Demo Video
WATCH: Pebble Tossers' Use Case + watsonx Assistant Demo Video
Curios to learn more? You can visit this link to read more about IBM Data and AI for Social Impact (DAISI).