From Weeks of Research to Minutes: How NobleReach Became the AI-First Nonprofit Leading Tech Transfer Innovation

From Weeks of Research to Minutes: How NobleReach Became the AI-First Nonprofit Leading Tech Transfer Innovation

NobleReach, a mission-driven nonprofit focused on national service and tech transfer, transformed manual research and reporting into a fast, AI-driven workflow using StackAI—cutting week-long analyses to just minutes while boosting depth, accuracy, and scale.

NobleReach, a mission-driven nonprofit focused on national service and tech transfer, transformed manual research and reporting into a fast, AI-driven workflow using StackAI—cutting week-long analyses to just minutes while boosting depth, accuracy, and scale.

Client

NobleReach

Challenge

Manual research, competitor analysis, and tech transfer reports took a full week per project, slowing impact and overwhelming a small nonprofit team.

Solution

StackAI automated research, enrichment, and reporting, cutting turnaround from 7 days to 5 minutes while delivering deeper, more accurate insights at scale.

When Brian Hayt, Director of Business Analytics, first spotted the words “Built with StackAI” at the bottom of an MIT Orbit tool (one of many resources provided by the university to support AI-first organizations), he had no idea it would transform the way NobleReach worked. As a nonprofit dedicated to building a community of innovators across sectors to solve America’s toughest challenges and rekindle a spirit of national service, NobleReach’s mission spans crucial issues of national security, technological innovation, and public/private sector collaboration.

Since 2022, the foundation has bridged the gap between groundbreaking research and real-world impact by uniting leaders from government, academia, and industry. NobleReach teams work hand-in-hand with government agencies, universities, and more to strengthen the pipeline of public service tech and entrepreneurial talent and innovation, across the nation, at the state, local and federal levels. Its Innovation programs help accelerate the transfer of emerging technologies into solutions that strengthen national security and serve the public good, ensuring that technology moves beyond the lab and into the hands of those who need it most and building local capacity to sustain and scale over the long term.

But the work was often manual and labor-intensive, with day-to-day responsibilities that included tasks like reviewing research ideas, manually compiling competitor analyses, sifting through patent and publication databases, and drafting multi-page technology briefs for stakeholders, often under tight deadlines. Two in-house coders could help automate pieces of the process, but most of the heavy lifting fell on individual researchers.

That all changed when Brian started building with StackAI.

Brian was the first person at NobleReach to try StackAI, and he soon started a pilot program to test the platform’s capabilities. One early use case involved running summary statistics from government grants: the AI agent would take spreadsheets or other downloads from a government grant database and answer targeted questions about the data, saving the team precious time and energy. They quickly started utilizing Batch Processing, one of StackAI’s export templates, to run many queries simultaneously. Brian recalls the team’s excitement upon seeing the agent plugged into different LLMs from Anthropic and Perplexity (selected for different tasks) handling a batch of datasets with ease.

Once StackAI had surfaced at NobleReach, Brian’s colleagues tried the platform out on their own. One teammate on the Strategic Partnerships team created his own AI research assistant for location-specific events and programs that NobleReach might be interested in. This agent takes the name of a city (for example, Austin, TX), and a knowledge base of NobleReach’s goals and priorities, and searches for relevant events to attend in the area that might bolster NobleReach’s presence and impact. Even with no coding experience, this process was incredibly straightforward—and resulted in a practical AI agent generating value for the partnerships team.

Yet another use case for AI agents was to improve consistency across candidate scoring for NobleReach’s talent programming. This agent assisted employees who had previously sifted through up to 3,000 applications alone, checking on evaluations and scores given to candidates to ensure that staff-assigned grades are fair and accurate.

“When I saw a platform that could let us run complex workflows and data analysis without coding, and open it up to the rest of the organization, I was hooked…We evaluated every competitive analysis tool we could find online. None of them could do what we needed, until StackAI. It’s been doing a phenomenal job. There’s currently nothing else that can do this.”

Brian Hayt
Director of Business Analytics

But perhaps the most important use case came from the Innovation Team’s task of preparing detailed reports for universities and tech transfer offices. These reports help institutions determine if particular researchers may be a good fit for commercialization. The work is as varied as it is high-stakes: one day the team might be speaking with a researcher developing an advanced pharmaceutical; the next, assessing a wireless communications breakthrough, or products destined for space. For this team, though often learning things for the very first time, every conversation demands a deep understanding of technology that might not exist yet, competitive landscape, intellectual property, talent potential, and market opportunity.

Before StackAI, producing these in-depth reports took about a full week of painstaking research. The output was typically a 15-page report—highly valuable, but limited by the manual effort involved.

Now, the team has a new workflow: uploading a dataset, running it through multiple LLMs like GPT-4, Anthropic, and Perplexity, and pulling in trusted subscription databases for patents, publications, and company information. The agent then generates a fully cited, 35-page report in just five minutes.

A standout success of this AI agent is a competitor finder feature. Faced with emerging technologies so niche that competitors were nearly impossible to identify, the team designed a process on StackAI that contextualizes the technology, breaks it into its functional jobs, and searches for competitor companies (and even specific products) that meet those needs.

This tool continues to make a remarkable impact:

Seven days to five minutes: Research time reduced dramatically
More depth: Competitor analysis that outperformed Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and other competitive analysis tools
Reduced blank-page phobia: “Going from 70% to 100% is so much faster than starting from zero,” Brian says
A unique edge: “We can give our teams an edge at having really smart conversations because they can do quick evaluations of companies. They then go to our partners with the critical information they need to know, uncovered by a combination of AI tools and our own expertise," reports Brian

Behind the scenes, StackAI’s flexibility has been just as important as its speed:

New LLMs appear on the platform rapidly, and teams are encouraged to optimize workflows across an entire suite of LLMs
Individuals self-serve with rapid prototypes, eliminating developer bottlenecks
Weekly calls and direct Slack access to StackAI support means feature requests and fixes turn around in days have led to “confidence and excitement” across the organization
Custom tools and Python nodes allow database queries (regarding people, organizations, research papers, patents, and more) to be embedded directly into workflows, which have been “very effective"

Looking ahead, NobleReach plans to take what they've built internally and put it in the hands of partners.

By giving universities and researchers direct access to StackAI-powered portfolio evaluation tools that dramatically improve speed and confidence, NobleReach is empowering American talent to harness the next leap forward in technology—and revolutionizing the process of tech transfer itself.

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