Jamshed Patel is less than 90 days into his tenure as chief technology officer at Ministry Brands, a software maker that serves more than 90,000 churches and nonprofits. But his mission is clear: Invest more in artificial intelligence.
Patel intends to rely on a mix of generative and traditional AI to speed up software development, help produce sales and marketing materials, and make it easier for the company’s nonprofit clients to pull in donations.
“This technology has the ability to help our client organizations expand their reach and radically increase engagement,” says Patel, who was previously a vice president at several organizations including security provider Alert Enterprise, HR software maker Workday, and management services company ADP.
Ministry Brands helps manage $6.5 billion in charitable giving annually. To get to that scale, the company has beefed up its internal product development with acquisitions. It has scooped up church management software makers like WeGather and ParishSOFT, online donation platforms like WeShare and easyTithe, and compliance and background screening tools like Protect My Ministry. Today, Ministry Brands offers a portfolio of technology that helps with accounting, conducting background checks on volunteers, and donor outreach.
“We have acquired a lot of different companies and a lot of this software is very complex,” says Patel. “We wouldn’t want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading our product stack constantly.”
Ministry Brands has been investing in AI to accelerate its software development, including using AI tools to automate coding and analysis, detect security vulnerabilities, and generate technical documentation. A mix of traditional and generative AI is also used to sift through feedback from the tens of thousands of independent faith-based organizations Ministry Brands serves and then distill those insights to future product updates.
The company has also deployed an internal AI chatbot for the customer support team to make it easier to comb through internal information to better answer client questions.
In addition to bringing in more AI, Patel was hired to spearhead the development of Ministry Brand’s first-ever external, subscription-based offering of generative AI, which isn’t yet available. Its features could include automating back-office tasks like accounting, generating first drafts of marketing materials to send to parishioners, and creating a more data-driven, targeted outreach plan to nonprofit donors.
One area of focus at Ministry Brands ahead of Patel joining has been on new ways for donors to make recurring, automated monthly contributions through their mobile devices. For example, last year, Ministry Brands added Apple Pay and Venmo for church giving. The company says 42% of all giving at churches in Ministry Brands’ database come from digital methods including web, direct bank transfers, text-to-give, and cryptocurrency.
Patel says more churches should set themselves up for mobile giving, especially if they want to boost donations from younger adults. Only 16% of 1,126 church leaders surveyed by Ministry Brands saw an increase in giving from those between the ages of 18 to 29 in 2024 from a year earlier, versus a 34% increase from donors above 30. “For the younger generation, having the ability to reach them through mobile is critically important,” says Patel.
In the future, he theorizes that large language models could be trained on the Bible and other religious texts to develop a generative AI query tool that could help a religious leader prepare for a service. But Ministry Brands draws the line at creating and selling tools that would write for priests and pastors.
“You don’t want that to be generated by some AI and just delivered,” says Patel. “That has to come from the heart.”
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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