We are excited to share that Nava Labs, along with two partner organizations, received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to pilot artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools that support benefit navigators, or professionals who help people navigate and apply for benefits.
Nava Labs is a philanthropically funded division within Nava Public Benefit Corporation focused on prototyping policy and systems changes within government programs and advocating for their adoption. For the past year, our Nava Labs team has been researching, prototyping, and testing various AI-powered tools to support benefit navigators in helping families identify and enroll in benefit programs.
Through experimentation and user research with navigators, experts, and families, we identified an assistive chatbot as a promising solution to pilot. With the Gates Foundation grant, we’ll be able to test our generative-AI-enabled chatbot in real scenarios.
“We see the opportunity for this rigorously tested AI tool to enhance benefit navigators’ capacity to help people navigate complex public benefit programs more efficiently and effectively, ultimately improving the lives of thousands of low-income families,” said Martelle Esposito, Nava Labs’ Partnerships and Evaluation Manager. “Through the pilot program, Nava Labs will be able to refine and validate our AI-powered tools, ensuring the tools are adaptable, scalable, and human-centered.”
We’ll partner with Imagine LA, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles, for the first pilot. Imagine LA operates a comprehensive digital “Benefit Navigator” tool to help low-income people and families assess their eligibility for public benefits and tax credits. Our pilot will test and help enhance the assistive chatbot with navigators from multiple social service agencies that utilize Imagine LA’s “Benefit Navigator” tool.
“We are excited to test this AI-powered chatbot with our “Benefit Navigator” users,” said Jill Bauman, CEO of Imagine LA and co-founder of the "Benefit Navigator" with Brit Gilmore. “We’ll explore how the chatbot can enhance our existing tools and maintain our commitment to providing trusted information. This chatbot has the ability to further reduce our users’ administrative burdens and improve their program outcomes through increased knowledge of and access to benefits and tax credits.”
For the second pilot, Nava Labs will focus on developing and implementing other promising tools we’ve tested. This includes document processing support, referral generation, and case note summarization with next steps. We aim to assess the feasibility for widespread adoption and adaptability of AI-powered tools across different organizations.
