Being told that your child has been diagnosed with a critical illness is the news that no parent wants to hear, but inevitably that’s the scenario facing hundreds of families each year.

It’s in such tough times that Make-A-Wish comes into its own, a charitable organization dedicated to making childhood dreams come true. As Jamie Dormandy , UK COO, explains:

Our wish is to re-build hope and resilience in those hardest of times for families, those darkest of times. Whether it's being a princess for a day, whether it's meeting your favorite sports star, whether it's having the weekend of your life at a Disney park, wishes re-build hope in the future, allow children to dream again, and create joyful moments with families that are really irreplaceable.

Seeing the impact of a wish, seeing a child going going from a situation where things are being taken away and life is is reduced for that period, being given the opportunity to reach towards the periphery of their imagination, that thing that they they don't believe can happen or is outside of their current reality, coming true, has a huge impact.

Make-a-Wish was born in the USA, where Salesforce has invested $3 million in a three-year relationship, although the organization is a major use of the firm’s platform around the world. Last year alone more than 33,000 wishes were granted for children with critical illnesses in over 50 countries around the world.

In the UK, over a thousand wishes a year are being made real, more than ever before, which is good news. The less good news is that Make-A-Wish has a scalability issue on its hands with more demand than it can manage. Dormandy says:

We're still only reaching one in 10 children who are eligible for a wish. So our imperative is scale. How do we reach the nine in 10 we're not currently currently planning a wish for?

The answer here may well lie in agentic AI, suggests Dormandy :

Innovation is is hard. It's especially hard in a non-profit environment. My experience is that 90-95% of our time is spent filling the financial envelope, and then making sure as much of that as possible is spent on the mission. So carving out time for innovation is is really tough.

Make-A-Wish has been helped in this respect by Salesforce’s Accelerator Program, he says:

it’s given us funding, so we've been able to release people's time within our organization to focus on the agentic AI solution that we've been building. It's given us Salesforce product, including enhanced licensing to take advantage of the latest features, and crucially, it's given us capability. Pro bono volunteers from Salesforce have worked hand-in-glove with our own team, come alongside them, and it's been really beautiful to see actually our Salesforce volunteers being truly inspired by the mission and really go for those human outcomes with our team.

All three things have worked together as a package. Over and above delivering the project, those volunteers will leave a legacy of capability, and I'm already seeing that my team are speaking with much more confidence and acting with much more confidence about how they're going to maintain and develop the AI solution that we've we've developed.

So what does an agentic solution look like for an organization like Make-A-Wish? It looks like an agentic Fairy Godmother, apparently, an innovation out of the UK which Dormandy  pitches as doing two “amazing” things:

First of all, it's able to summarize the content of what a child is wishing for. That comes in many dimensions of data, such as really specific, structured data, such as the child's accessibility needs, the precise temperature a refrigerator needs to be to store a child's medication safely, so we can grant that wish in a safe way. 

And then there’s stuff that comes straight from the child's imagination, so things like 'I would like to ride into my princess party on a unicorn'. Those are very different types of data there, and our agentic solution is able to sift through all of that, work from the semantics, and bring forward to our wish granter as a human in the loop at that point a recommendation or a set of recommendations for what that wish could be.

He cites the example of a boy called Dylan, who wanted to have a weekend enjoying lots of Christmas festivities in London, and to go to the Harry Potter studios. But thing that really made his eyes light up for his wish was the idea of walking into a hotel and feeling like Macaulay Culkin does in Home Alone 2 - Lost in New York. Dormandy  recalls:

Where he walks into this luxurious hotel, that was the picture that Dylan had in his mind. So, our agentic solution, the agentic Fairy Godmother, was able to look through our data and pick up language as precise as that, and then summarize that as a wish journey. And then the second thing it does, which really enables us to scale, is match the components of that wish to our generous donors and suppliers, who will often give us those items at a heavy discount or for free.

In this case, when we played Dylan's wish through the model, and it picked up this this lovely vision of walking into the hotel like McCauley Culkin, it recommended a hotel. We have a partnership with The Savoy in London, a beautiful place, and it meets that description. So it brought specifically that recommendation out. It saves our wish granter, our human in the loop, a huge amount of time, but they're validating that. They're checking that for the nuances of the wish and selecting those items so that we're able to grant those wish. We're not leaving anything on the table. We're able to fully utilize all those offers that our client donors and partners have given us, but they're not lost, you know, in in the dregs of a spreadsheet.

And that has a demonstrable effect, he points out:

Immediately it enables us to double our impact, so that’s pretty astonishing. But the really important thing here is is scale. I’s not just a numbers game. I think that the conversation about AI for non-profits can slide down that slope if we're not careful. Like a lot of organizations, the place we started with AI was more internally and driving efficiencies, but actually it's it's not a race to the bottom with this. It’s these human outcomes that we're trying to deliver which should be a spiral upwards. Ultimately, we're about impact and that's that's much more than just a number. 

Keeping the children in need front-and-center is critical, insists Dormandy :

If it just becomes about efficiency, then I think we're we're leaving a whole load of opportunity behind.

As for the future, Dormandy  has his own wish to make:

Over and above the benefits of the solution we've got now, we'd really like to take it that much further. We'd love to see something that's child-facing ultimately in this space that enables a child to playfully interact with their wish ideas and give them options, give them agency. We find that the core elements of the impact of a wish are a child re-building hope and re-gaining agency, so giving them the opportunity to do that as they design their own wish, something that a child attracts for themselves and gets to put in those those beautiful little details that make their eyes light up, that’s where we'd love to get to.

As to how realistic that wish is, he concludes:

We're at a moment of great opportunity where we have a huge amount of agency. So my advice  to others would be, build the world you want to live in, build the world you'd like your children to live in, build the world that your customers want to live in. Don't stay at table stakes. Do things cheaper, do things faster, yes,. They’re the tickets of the game and the business case always needs to stack up and needs to be managed.

But to lead, let's build the world that we want to live in. I’ve  found that to inspire people, you have to connect to purpose, and that purpose has got to be about human outcomes ultimately. So, whether you're a non-profit, a government agency, or a business, inspiring teams to do human outcomes will help us lead through a time of a lot of uncertainty. Focusing on that purpose is the advice that I would give to people leading leading teams.

If you want to help a child make their dreams come true, you can find out how to be your very own Fairy Godmother by clicking here.