America On Tech Transforms Grant Reporting with Tableau Next
Created a 32x faster reporting process, improving time to insight from four days to one hour
Improved efficiency by 20%, saving staff one day per week for higher-impact program work
Adopted by 100% of AOT’s Data & Development team members and integrated into workflows
America On Tech helps prepare thousands of students from underestimated communities for careers in technology. By leveraging Tableau Next, Data Cloud, and Agentforce, they have created an agentic analytics solution that slashed data gathering for funder grant reports by more than 90% and advanced data culture across their national organization.
About the Company
America On Tech (AOT) is a national nonprofit preparing the next generation of technology leaders from underestimated communities. AOT has served over 5,300 students in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta, and has placed 1,100 interns who have generated ~$4.1 million in wages. AOT alumni are twice as likely to attend college and five times more likely to major in STEM than their peers.
Previously our Salesforce administrator would have to pull the data whenever our fundraising team needed it for grant reports, and it would take three or four days to turn around all the information. Now anyone on the team can ask questions to the agent and have all their answers in a matter of minutes. It speeds up the whole process and our ability to get back to our partners faster, which they appreciate, and our Salesforce administrator and the rest of our staff are able to work on higher-level strategic projects.
The Challenge
Data silos and personalized requests
The AOT team manages more than 50 funder reports every year. The support of these funders is vital to the continuation of AOT’s mission, but reporting bottlenecks made the process manually intensive, with data spread across Salesforce, Google Docs, and Hello Insight.
In addition, each funder issues strict guidelines to provide grant progress reports in specific formats to meet their goals, whether to fund a specific program or region, or to get updates on career success based on students being placed into internships. This made pulling all the different cuts of data highly time consuming to staff while diverting them from cultivating stronger funder relationships. With every report and data request essentially a unique one-off, getting this data in the right format could easily consume up to four days.
How Tableau Helps
Making sense of data with Tableau Next and Agentforce
In early 2025, AOT was selected to become part of the Salesforce Accelerator – Agents for Impact program, an initiative to provide nonprofits with technology, expertise, and funding to build and deploy autonomous AI agents via the Agentforce platform. In addition to a two-year contract of donated products to support their vision, AOT received 12 months of coaching from Salesforce experts and pro bono volunteers, including a customized 6-month consulting program. AOT was excited to become one of the first users of Tableau Next as part of the Salesforce Accelerator. Although it had been a Salesforce CRM and Customer Data Platform (now Data Cloud) customer since 2021, it was AOT’s first experience working with Tableau.“Salesforce really helped us track all our program data, our student data, and then we also built it out on the fundraising side,” said Stanley Smith, AOT’s National Director of Strategy. “To use all the data from an agent perspective, we needed to move it into Tableau Next so the agent could really make sense of it through Tableau dashboards.”
Accenture, Salesforce’s largest implementation partner and Tableau’s Global Services Partner of the Year in 2021, already had chosen AOT as part of its Corporate Citizenship program and saw an opportunity to collaborate with Tableau and AOT. They worked as a systems integrator to build out AOT’s agentic AI solution, deploying Tableau Semantics, Salesforce’s AI semantic layer integrated into Data Cloud, to translate their data into their business language, so the agent would have a deeper knowledge of their business and respond with higher accuracy about AOT’s reporting dashboards, specific funder requirements, and critical program data fields. Being trained on these nuances is critical because some students may have started with AOT in 2022 but returned for a second or third program. With Tableau Semantics, AOT can be sure that its agent is pulling the relevant data at the right time, and that responses are accurate, consistent, and immediately useful.
This was a great project for Accenture because it’s a first-in-kind implementation of Tableau Next. I think what's exciting about it is the ability to have a conversational dialogue with your data and ask questions of it that you might struggle with if you’re not a data developer or have the ability to build the dashboards.
The Tableau Difference
Streamlining insight retrieval into the flow of work
AOT appreciates the intuitive nature of using Agentforce and is impressed with how well it provides everyday business language that works for its users and funders.
Tableau Next is also helping to deepen AOT’s existing data culture and impress upon its staff the importance of creating ideal prompts as well as having clean, governed data that is digestible for AI in order to receive results that can be used to create powerful narratives about its activities.
AOT is already looking forward to the next step in its AI journey, training its agent on additional AOT narratives to provide more robust answers.
The Results
The most obvious benefit for the AOT team is Tableau Next’s speed of retrieving the right data – 32x faster than was possible previously, improving time to insight from four days to one hour. Now team members can ask questions of the AI agent within Tableau Next in their natural flow of work and get results in seconds. This dramatic improvement in data retrieval time allows staff to spend far more time on higher-impact program work, and has been adopted by 100% of AOT’s Data & Development team members and integrated into workflows.
Leveraging Tableau Next, AOT can quickly show that students in its programs are meeting targeted outcomes and funder requirements. With time freed from reporting, staff can cultivate stronger funder relationships that sustain growth and mission impact.
Tableau Next also helps the AOT organization build its internal operational reports about student participation and key success metrics in a fraction of the time. Tableau is a vital part of a broader AI initiative at AOT. Ensuring their students are well versed and skilled in AI, regardless of the technology role or discipline they are pursuing. The lesson from the Tableau Next implementation is clear: partnering with AI is a foundational piece of today’s and tomorrow’s jobs, as long as it supports and can be used in the daily flow of work.
A lot of our funders are in the tech space, and they love to see that we're using cutting-edge AI tools to be more efficient and effective. Of course, the ultimate benefit is being able to serve more young people and have our staff more focused on getting them into technology careers.