Mar 18, 2019 By Jeff Elder

AI in Rural Honduras? Salesforce.Org Project Helps Families and the Environment

in Artificial Intelligence, Corporate Culture

If someone told you artificial intelligence was being used in kitchen installations, you might imagine lavish California suburbs, marble countertops, and the unblinking eyes of the Internet of Things.

This week, Salesforce.org is hosting AI for Good week, full of virtual events to showcase the human side of AI. Artificial intelligence stories may take you to places you didn’t expect, and at Salesforce.org, we’re lucky enough to help some fascinating projects.

Some 3,000 miles south of Silicon Valley, the families of rural Honduras cook over smoky wood fires that endanger their children – and the environment.

The nonprofit Proyecto Mirador builds clean cookstoves in rural Honduras. Their work has saved 7 million trees and changed the lives of 800,000 people.

Example of using Salesforce Einstein Vision to help classify the quality of clean cookstove installation, to provide fast feedback to nonprofit employees in the field

Cookstove installations in villages here are not part of remodeling. They are a new way of life, a way out from under a dark ceiling of carbon and danger.

In remote rural communities, lone technicians had to make isolated judgments about quality control – and if they made a mistake it could be dangerous. Returning to a village to fix an improperly installed stove could bring a technician face-to-face with armed drug gangs. The technicians needed all the support they could get.

Proyecto Mirador worked with Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud to improve quality control. Now, using an AI vision tool implemented by Mogli Technologies, Proyecto Mirador technicians can get near-instant quality-control feedback on their chimney installations via Mogli SMS for text messaging. Using text, any employee can submit images to determine a good or bad chimney installation. Using cell phones to send photos of newly installed chimneys into a smart database containing many examples of good and bad chimney installations, field technicians receive immediate feedback from Einstein on whether their work is correct.

A nonprofit employee takes a photo of cookstove installation to get feedback in near-real-time, using Mogli SMS

Einstein Vision helps Proyecto Mirador train more cookstove technicians in order to reduce training time and implement efficient quality control to manage 2,000 stove installations a month.

“Einstein is helping us train people,” says Reniery Rodriguez, Proyecto Mirador’s IT director.

For more information watch this presentation by Proyecto Mirador and Mogli. Tune into the kickoff of AI For Good Week here. Read more about AI For Good on the Salesforce Blog here.