Two decades after its founding, Google.org is rewriting its playbook to put artificial intelligence at the center of its giving strategy.
During an impact summit held in September in Sunnyvale, Calif., the tech giant’s philanthropic arm announced several initiatives, including a $17 million program to help nonprofits learn A.I. skills, part of its $75 million push to provide tech training to 1 million Americans. Google.org is also refocusing its mission and philanthropy around three key areas where it believes A.I. can make the most impact. The first is knowledge, skills, and learning; the second is scientific advancement; and the third is resilient communities.
“Ten years ago, it was 1,000 flowers blooming, maybe 10,000 flowers blooming, in terms of social-impact projects going on all around the company,” said Maggie Johnson, who took over as global head of Google.org in February. “What’s happened over the last year or two is trying to really define a set of focus areas that work for Google.”
This shift represents a significant evolution from Google.org’s origins. As Google went public back in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin envisioned a foundation that would ultimately “eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.” In the years since, Google.org has tackled a mishmash of causes, from criminal-justice reformto climate change, portioning 4 million pro bono and volunteer hours from employees.
In the last 10 years alone, Google.org and Google employees have made a hefty $6 billion in cash funding. By comparison, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported nearly $74 billion in net income for 2023 and has an overall stock-market value of about $2 trillion.
The past five years have seen $200 million in Google.org funding directed specifically to A.I.-related projects, signaling a pivot that’s now positioning A.I. at the core of Google.org’s philanthropic efforts.
“At different times over the last 20 years, it has gone in different directions,” Johnson said of Google.org’s prior iterations. The new emphasis on A.I. and set of priorities is “really trying to focus it and align it with what’s important for the company.”
In other words, as Google has become more A.I.-centric, with CEO Sundar Pichai announcing the company would be “reimagining all of our products” to include A.I. last May, so, too, has Google.org.
Johnson, who took the helm of Google.org after nearly two decades overseeing the company’s tech training programs and a previous stint teaching computer science at Stanford, is now steering the philanthropy toward causes where A.I. seems promising as a significant solution.
The new strategy comes with significant financial commitments across all three new focus areas through the end of 2024 in addition to new nonprofit training resources. These include:
- $40 million in academic research for responsible A.I. development in collaboration with the academic research community.
- $12 million for organizations using A.I. on the education front, plus $8 million for DataKind, a nonprofit that uses A.I. to identify students at risk of dropping out.
- $10 million for the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s efforts to bring an A.I. learning program to 2 million young people in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Additionally, Google.org plans to introduce “A.I. Collaboratives” for partner organizations dedicated to tackling complex issues using A.I.-powered solutions.
This year’s summit also marked the graduation of Google.org’s first cohort of 21 nonprofits from its $20 million, six-month A.I. Accelerator program, which provided funding and pro bono support to tech-savvy nonprofits using generative A.I. A second round of the accelerator, with $30 million in funding, will open for applications this fall.
Google.org’s shift to A.I. comes as many nonprofits remain hesitant about the rapidly developing technology. A recent Google.org survey found that while 80 percent of nonprofits believe generative A.I. could apply to their work, nearly half are not using it.
To bridge this gap, the philanthropy is investing $17 million in training for nonprofits and launching a set of free online resources to help nonprofits take advantage of generative A.I., including tailored instructions on how to ask Gemini, the company’s A.I. chatbot, for help in identifying relevant grants, drafting social-media posts, or building onboarding processes.
The crash course in A.I. also includes best practices for managing the risks and limitations of the technology, which has been criticized for privacy concerns, biases, and often opaque logic behind its outputs.
When you get an answer from a chatbot, “assume it’s not right,” said Johnson, alluding to the hallucinations or inaccuracies that continue to plague advanced A.I. models. “You have to learn how to take what is really positive, but also understand the risks and apply it in ways that are safe.”
Despite those cautions, Johnson contends that the time-saving advantages of A.I. outweigh the risks, when the technology is applied thoughtfully.
“It’s really quite remarkable how quickly and efficiently you can create marketing collateral that is super customized to your audience” using A.I., she said, noting that the “productivity boosts can make a huge difference” for small nonprofits, whose employees often wear multiple hats.
As Google.org pushes for wider A.I. adoption, Johnson emphasized that the human in nonprofit work remains irreplaceable, even by the most advanced algorithm, at least for now: “I can’t imagine a world where you would not need to have a nonprofit on the ground,” she said.
