We hosted a total of 80 participants, including the Glific team, at Fireflies in Bangalore. The location was away from the hustle of the city, amid nature. This blog from Fawas in the Glific team gives you a glimpse into the 2-days of the Accelerator workshop: https://glific.org/building-for-impact-inside-my-first-ai-accelerator-experience/. 

Bangalore had an unusual heat wave that posed a few logistical challenges, but everyone was very motivated to learn and build using AI, and the discomforts didn’t dampen their spirits. We received positive feedback on the sessions that were conducted, the mentors were applauded by all NGOs, for the 1:1 time and hands-on experience in building their own chatbot. The baseline on the NGOs’ AI knowledge and chatbot building capabilities was surveyed, with only a couple of outliers; over 28 NGOs rated themselves 2 or under for how confident they were in their AI knowledge and of running a chatbot (raw results here). Our aim through the next 5 months, is to mentor them in learning these skills and being confident about scaling their chatbot program. We do expect a few NGOs to hit roadblocks, and 10-15% might not be able to meet their goals, but we are aiming to keep our goal at 85% and above of the total 34 NGOs. 

Given we have evals and voice in place, we do expect 50% of the NGOs to pilot using voice, and more than 50% of the AI chatbots running Evals before their launch. One thing we need to figure out is how to lower the cost barrier on the RAG-based LLM and Voice credits beyond the cohort period. Looking forward to the journey in the next few months, while keeping an eye on the goals for each NGO and that of the Accelerator cohort. Stay tuned to #Glific on Linkedin for updates on this cohort’s progress.