September 30, 2025 by Om Bhardwaj, Vinay Venu
Artificial Intelligence often feels futuristic, but its real power lies in solving everyday problems—especially in the development sector. To explore this potential, Project Tech4Dev and The Agency Fund launched the AI Building Cohort, a pilot program for NGOs. The cohort offers hands-on technical support, mentorship, and peer learning, helping organizations design and deploy AI solutions that are both practical and ethical.
Participants aren’t just experimenting with shiny tech—they’re building prototypes, testing real-world use cases, and preparing their teams to adopt AI thoughtfully. The program emphasizes Responsible AI practices, including data privacy, transparency, and community-centered decision-making.
For us at Avni, the cohort was a chance to experiment with AI in ways that match our roadmap—making digital adoption simpler for grassroots NGOs while keeping solutions ethical, scalable, and impactful.
For Avni, exploring AI is about staying future-ready and relevant to the NGOs we serve. Across industries, AI is already in everyday tools, boosting productivity and lowering barriers to complex tasks. For grassroots NGOs, AI can be transformative. It can reduce the technical skills and cost needed to implement and manage digital solutions.
Before the cohort, we were using AI for productivity gains. We leveraged ChatGPT for writing and idea generation, Windsurf/IntelliJ AI for coding, and built tools for generating test data tailored to each organization’s schema. We also experimented with a documentation bot and converting spreadsheet requirements into JSON files to create initial implementation skeletons.
For the cohort, we focused on one key problem: helping users understand Avni and build solutions independently. By reducing technical friction, we aim to make existing users self-sufficient, new users confident, and accelerate adoption of AI-driven workflows.
During the sprint, we explored other participants’ problem statements, some closely aligned with our sector. Sneha Foundation focused on AI-based maternal risk prediction, while IPE Global worked on predicting low birth weight in children. Sessions from Tattle on AI safety and Digital Futures Lab on responsible AI highlighted potential pitfalls.
A standout experience was working with our mentors, Vinod and Rajsekar, who spent significant time guiding us. They led deep dives on building system prompts, testing multi-turn conversations, and evaluation strategies—ensuring we developed robust, reliable AI solutions while learning best practices.
The cohort also offered personal takeaways. Om learned how AI can act as a “judge” to test workflows built on LLMs, and saw the value of a collaborative, in-person environment. For Vinay, it reinforced the importance of thoughtful AI integration to enhance usability and impact while staying ethical.
Since the sprint, we've made solid progress on our AI initiatives for Avni. The first release is out and is getting good positive feedback. See the tool in action here.
We envision the AI assistant eventually configuring Avni autonomously for new organizations. This would cut onboarding time and cost dramatically and make the setup process intuitive for non-technical users. Avni could become truly self-serviceable, empowering NGOs to adopt digital solutions with minimal support. Being part of the AI Cohort has been deeply enriching. It gave us space to experiment, validate ideas, and strengthen Avni’s mission of simplifying digital adoption for grassroots NGOs, guided throughout by our mentors, peers, and organizers.Join our Avni community on Discord to share your thoughts, ask questions, and get the latest updates.
Need a walkthrough or have questions? Feel free to schedule a demo call here.