Re-humanizing AI with community voices to deliver economic mobility in America

Great technological breakthroughs, like AI today or the Internet a few decades ago, hold great promise of augmenting human experience. But left unchecked, they can upend industries and risk deepening the divide between the haves and have-nots. Unlike yesterday’s technological upheavals, today, we are equipped with more data and the hard-earned lessons of the past. 

These lessons tell us that we must be intentional about distributing the benefits of technology across our communities. We can’t afford not to, as the well-being and economic stability of future generations depends on how we meet this moment. 

As we announce PCV’s new strategic plan 2025-2030, along with the acquisition of Radiant Data, a mission-driven technology and AI startup, to become PCV’s new Radiant Data Hub, we commit to a future where the power of responsible technology and AI is placed in the hands of small business entrepreneurs, workers, and the mission-driven organizations that champion them—especially those long underserved and overlooked. 

In the second of three articles about PCV’s journey toward building an inclusive AI-powered economy, we share how we have been realizing the vision of a future where ethical technology and AI tools are co-created with communities, uplifting and augmenting human potential, instead of displacing or diminishing it. 

We believe this is a journey toward reimagining the American Dream this country was founded with and has yet to achieve for all – and now is the time to recommit ourselves to shaping the future we want. We cannot solve this market failure with the same market mechanisms that created the failure our industry was born to solve; we must innovate with courage to reimagine and harness products and services that meet the needs of our communities and to shape an economy that works for all.

Yes, AI can be a powerful tool to help enable us to do that, or we can let ourselves be at its mercy.

Innovating for opportunity

As one of the country’s first impact investing organizations, incubated out of a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley, PCV has long been a maverick. Deploying data-driven, community centric investments in small business entrepreneurs, PCV helps create good quality jobs that uplift historically underserved communities. 

PCV is also a federally and state-certified community development financial institution (CDFI), a field born out of the Civil Rights movement as the economic justice pillar more than 30 years ago following a federal acknowledgment of discrimination and redlining in the formal financial industry. 

While many companies facing trade-offs between technology and workers have been retreating from the quality job creation efforts, PCV has been leaning into empowering small businesses to do the opposite. Over the past five years, we have been on a journey to realize our founding visions – grounding in mission, while incubating innovation, including in our impact underwriting, data-driven impact measurement work, and ethical AI in service of economic inclusion.

In this work, we draw on worker perspectives, elevating community voices, and co-creating solutions that reflect lived experience. For almost four years, this journey has included collaborating with Radiant Data to design and deploy cutting edge tools in our Good Jobs initiative. 

Now part of PCV, Radiant Data was founded to re-humanize data, amplify unheard voices, and advance economic opportunity through AI. With a team of mission-driven AI/ML engineers, Radiant hit its stride quickly by tending to a gaping, painful hole in the impact finance ecosystem: mission-driven organizations who could not afford but stood to benefit the most from AI and machine learning (ML) talent. 

Through the years, the team crafted approachable tools to help impact investors collect feedback at scale, streamline their operations, adopt predictive modeling, and build solid, future-proof data infrastructure, while upholding its founding commitments to co-create these technologies with underserved communities, to leverage AI to unleash human creative energy, and advance data autonomy for dignity. 

PCV was among Radiant’s first clients to recognize the potential in these tools to scale impact-first investing and social outcomes four years ago, with both CEOs having worked together in prior mission-driven startups. PCV partnership offered mission alignment and an unshakeable commitment to stay grounded in Radiant’s values. 

Together, our strengths fit together like a deeply grooved jigsaw puzzle: extensive experience in community investment, business advisory, and good jobs creation, now complemented by ethical AI and approachable technology applications to broaden the scope for deeper impact.

AI-supported economic dignity

As PCV launches its ambitious 5-year strategic plan, PCV’s Radiant Data Hub is poised to amplify our community impact to date and become a trusted partner to other CDFIs, social enterprises, impact investors, and mission-driven funders, ensuring affordable access to high quality technology governance and AI tools. Reimagining with courage and innovation how we use this technology to uplift our missions, not be at its mercy. 

Together, PCV and Radiant have already pioneered a new model for data autonomy: our tools and programs are designed to compensate community stakeholders for their feedback and gather and convert feedback at scale into insights that reimagine new products and programs, together. 

We have also created playbooks for the CDFI ecosystem, and we are eager to collaborate with like-minded organizations, share what works, build a “data commons” infrastructure to conduct analytics and build algorithms at a grander scale, and most importantly, share the financial and social benefits of this work – for, by, and with our communities. Through PCV’s own data and AI transformation journey over the past four years, we are reimagining the mission-driven space buttressed by tech-enhanced, ethical solutions, such as:

• Predictive credit risk models that empower more equitable lending and deploy capital faster into underserved communities. Our algorithms include rather than exclude, control for bias, and supplement – not replace, loan officers.
  
• Clustering analysis to define market segments and customer journeys, surfacing non-obvious financial and social factors to increase uptake of CDFI products and services.

• Infrastructure development and streamlining of operations through delivery of an end-to-end assessment of internal systems, measuring an organization’s data velocity, and identifying data bottlenecks.
  
• Data warehouse development into a “single source of truth” repository.
  
• Using AIKKA for voice-based feedback data collection and synthesis to integrate workers and community stakeholders’ insights quickly and efficiently into program delivery and product design.
  
• Enhanced impact storytelling by combining quantitative and qualitative data to craft human-centered stories in interactive, media-rich formats, helping partners communicate their impact to key audiences. 

Through deep commitment to leveraging technology and financial services as transformative levers for job creation, wealth-building, inspired entrepreneurship, and economic mobility, PCV and our new Radiant Data Hub will work to re-humanize data insights by blending qualitative and quantitative data into powerful narratives that mobilize action – by, for, and with our clients, and all our country’s small business entrepreneurs. The moment calls for it. 

This is how we can collectively act to leverage the power of AI to save the American promise of economic dignity, for all … it is up to us.

Bulbul Gupta is the President and CEO of Pacific Community Ventures, one of the country’s first impact investing funds and a community development financial institution. Prior to PCV, she helped co-found Socos Labs, an ethical AI think tank in Berkeley, CA, and worked in the impact investing field towards inclusive entrepreneurship and good jobs for the future of workers.

Sachi Shenoy is now Chief Data Officer at PCV, recently co-founder and CEO of Radiant Data, and a successful entrepreneur who has worked for 30 years at the intersection of finance, data science, and economic development. She is passionate about community investment, creating equal access to opportunity and dignified jobs.