Power of Agentic Labor for Nonprofits

A look at how nonprofits can embrace the change in technology accelerating their mission with agentic labor.

I first learned about the Power of Us Program back in 2007 on my second tour of duty with Salesforce. For the entirety of the program 501(c)3 nonprofits got ten “free” licenses (like a puppy) from Salesforce, after which additional licenses received a heavy discount. So for the last almost twenty years it has felt like an incredible gift to nonprofits to get access to this powerful platform at a very good starting point.

Leveling Up with Portfolio 2.0

At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce announced their new portfolio of products, bundling them together with Slack, Tableau Next, Data 360, Sales, and support. This new approach allows nonprofits access to not only Nonprofit Cloud, but for the first time ever, an agentic workforce as part of the package.

What is an Agentic Workforce?

“Agentic Workforce” isn’t just tech jargon. We feel strongly, as do others, agentic workforce, also known as agentic labor, will be one of the greatest gifts for nonprofit organizations. Agentic labor is the concept of using AI agents (sometimes referred to as bots) that can think, reason, have memory and learn, and complete previously tedious tasks. Need to research a major donor, write up your notes, update Salesforce, and queue up an email to send to that donor? Done. Want to grab the latest CSV file from the shared drive, de-duplicate it against what is in Salesforce, load it into Salesforce, and double-check the work? Done.

Let’s Talk Bots

The last few months have seen a considerable uptick with the release of numerous new agentic models of digital labor platforms. Cursor released Grok Bot, OpenAI has Dot, Claude offers Duet, and Meta released Muse. All are helpful digital assistants that can learn how to do what you need them to do and then do those useful things autonomously. Salesforce has been in the game for a while and already has three offerings in Agentforce, Slackbot, and now Coworker, all of which can help nonprofits and their missions.

Agentforce

The core of Agentforce is a reasoning engine that sits within Salesforce and is backed by the Trust Layer. It can be given specific tasks, update records, or stand on the front line of a nonprofit website like Global Citizen and support donor requests, membership renewals, or event RSVPs. Inside Salesforce, it can also help internal users fill out fields, create summaries, or simply walk users through a complex set of clicks, saving tons of time.

Slackbot

Slackbot is a collaborative digital assistant where you can define skills and build routines. Not only can Slackbot look at data from inside Slack, it can read data from then write data back to Salesforce. In addition, Slack can look at your calendars, your email, and even files in your organization’s cloud. By reviewing all this information, Slack can show you everything from your most important to-do items today to reminding you to drink more water (seriously). The “always there to help” availability makes Slackbot a powerful tool for nonprofits. From drafting structured fundraising campaigns to specific program suggestions, Slackbot is agent labor done right. And now, since it is now part of the core Nonprofit Cloud bundle, every nonprofit organization should RUN to enable and learn how to use it. Arkus will do a public workshop on Slackbot soon, so sign up for our events newsletter here.

Coworker

Coworker is similar to Slackbot but it lives inside Salesforce and it’s available for all editions and products. Coworker can also be hooked up to external sources like mail, calendar, G-Suite, and yes, you guessed it, Slack. Recently, Coworker has been updated to include Slackbot-like skills and preserve past chat history so you can return to previous conversations. Ask Coworker which opportunities are lagging and have it suggest the next steps to take. Need to take a couple of actions on the same donor? Tell Coworker to update the donor’s email address, adjust their opportunity close date to the end of next month, and assign yourself a task to follow up with the donor in two weeks. Coworker can reason through your request and, since it’s built into your Salesforce platform, it doesn’t matter how much custom configuration you have, who did the setup, how, or when. If you are on Nonprofit Cloud, Coworker understands your data model automatically. It doesn’t matter if you use Nonprofit Cloud or Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Coworker works by seeing what is installed and just “figures it out”.

The Power of Digital Labor

There are more than a few things that make digital labor helpful to nonprofits and a few of them are just basic tenets of how the bots work. Firstly, digital labor is very precise, as long as you ask it to be, so it can check, double-check, and triple-check results to make sure they are correct. By nature, humans don’t love to do quality assurance, but QA is where agents thrive. And because the agent steps through a carefully defined series of steps, agents can also document its provided results very thoroughly. Want a process automated but know the outcome in a very thorough document? Prompt your agent, and it will happily tell you everything it did, how it did it, and where it left things off. Give an agent a skill and it can perform that complex task whenever needed without veering from the objective and without cutting corners.

Yes, and…There’s Always an Arkus Expert in the Loop

As a technology company, we at Arkus have been enthusiastic early adopters of AI, agentic workflows, and now digital labor. Early adoption comes with its own risks and rewards, so we made sure to build, test, and sometimes discard our proofs of concept. Today, we’ve rolled out agents and bots across our organization. One of the key lessons we learned during our early work is the need to keep humans in the loop. You need a technical expert to set up the agent, prompt the right things, set the guardrails, check the security, and test it. You need a business process or data expert in the loop to ensure the output being provided is realistic and logical. When you need human experts in the loop to help you design, configure, and deploy your digital workforce, reach out to Arkus.

Salesforce has given nonprofits a remarkable head start for almost twenty years, and agentic labor is the next chapter of that story. But agents are only as good as the humans behind them. At Arkus, we've applied sixteen years and more than three thousand projects’ worth of consulting experience to build playbooks that keep agents on track. Are you looking for the next step in your AI journey at your organization? Come talk to us and see how we can put an Arkus Expert in the loop for your nonprofit.

NOTE: This blog post was written by a human, with another human editing it. No AI was used except to publish it to the website and to research some of the links.