When Brian Hayt, Senior Director of Innovation Platforms, 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.

The Challenge: Manual Research Slowing High-Stakes Innovation

NobleReach's Innovation Team helps institutions understand current research, determine whether particular researchers are a good fit for certain projects, or evaluate whether an idea could be spun out into a startup. The work is as varied as it is high-stakes: one day the team might be assessing an advanced pharmaceutical; the next, a wireless communications breakthrough or products destined for space. Every conversation demands a deep understanding of technology that might not exist yet, competitive landscape, intellectual property, talent potential, and market opportunity.

The Solution: A Platform That Scales With the Mission

Brian launched a pilot program to test StackAI's capabilities. One early use case involved running summary statistics from government grants: the AI agent would take spreadsheets from a government grant database and answer targeted questions about the data, saving the team time and energy. The team quickly adopted Batch Processing to run many queries simultaneously across LLMs from Anthropic and Perplexity.

"The export functionality makes things incredibly simple. I don't need to spin out another website to host the agent; I don't need to have everybody look at me strangely when I email them an odd executable," says Brian.

What happened next was organic adoption. Without any top-down mandate, colleagues across NobleReach started building on their own.