It has been a busy fall at One Degree. On Tuesday the team joined together with our Google.org Gen AI Accelerator colleagues for a mid-point presentation to demo progress to date. It is an extraordinary group of committed leaders grappling with the challenges of applying new technologies, to old problems.

At One Degree, we have been focused on two workflows where AI can reduce friction for people seeking help and the caseworkers who support them. First, our new natural-language search prototype lets people ask for support the way they naturally speak (“food pantries in Oakland”) and receive verified, structured results pulled from One Degree’s resource database to improve connection rates.

Second, we’re kicking off AI-assisted intake: parsing organizations’ existing forms to generate secure digital versions and offering privacy-aware pre-fill so referrals arrive complete—cutting phone-tag and drop-offs.

Early user research underscored four challenges we will be working on over the next few months: speed, trust & accuracy (human-verified results), privacy by design, and clear value and differentiation familiar tools like Google Search and ChatGPT.

What’s next? The team is hardening evaluations, moving the AI search experience to production, and prototyping the intake flow so it plays nicely with today’s systems—and tomorrow’s agents—without burdening small nonprofits.

For a closer look click here: One Degree’s Gen AI Mid-Point Presentation