Case Study: FoodCloud

Inside FoodCloud’s organic approach to AI literacy and cultural change

How FoodCloud’s purpose-first approach helped non-technical teams discover everyday uses for AI.

• 15 AI champions across different departments.
• 400+ charity feedback responses analysed each month.
• 100+ volunteers supported through an AI-assisted scheduling system.

AI adoption doesn’t have to start with a big piece of technology. At FoodCloud, it began with an employee survey and one rule that stuck: understand the problem first, then decide if AI is the right tool.

Connecting surplus food from businesses with charities, FoodCloud’s work relies as much on volunteers and logistics as on its own platform, Foodiverse. And it’s in those less technical parts of the organisation that AI has truly taken hold.

Listening before launching

FoodCloud already had a strong tech team using data and digital tools to support its work. But across the wider organisation, the picture was more mixed.

“We have an amazing tech team that is way ahead because of the nature of their work,” says project manager Micaela Toledo. “But we also have two-thirds of the organisation that are non-technical teams. Their role is equally crucial, but they don’t have that technical background.”

A 2024 staff survey had already flagged the gap. Some employees were experimenting with AI on personal accounts. Others hadn’t started at all. Toledo used the survey results as a starting point.

For Enterprise Ireland clients at a similar stage, Digital Discover can help assess where AI or digital tools could create value, identify practical use cases and prioritise next steps.

“It was actually a really good baseline,” she says. “There were a number of areas we needed to address, and they became the foundation for our AI programme. We needed to put everyone in the same boat in terms of AI and data literacy.”

The human element

FoodCloud started with some basics. First, the company upgraded its Google Workspace licence so staff could work safely with Google’s AI tool Gemini without sharing sensitive company information. But Toledo says the harder work was about people.

“Some staff were feeling really excited about AI. Others felt like they were cheating or began questioning their purpose,” she says. “We needed the strategy to feel really inclusive.”

“What was really important was to keep purpose-first mindsets,” she says. “We don’t want to adopt AI just for the sake of adopting it.”

Peer power over top-down rules

Rather than mandate AI use from the top, FoodCloud built an internal network: 15 AI champions across different departments, trained to identify a problem first and only then look for an AI solution.

One champion is a grants officer who built a custom AI assistant in Google’s Gemini that searches for suitable funding by country, sector and deadline, cutting hours of research into minutes.

Elsewhere, FoodCloud’s head of support used Google’s AI research tool NotebookLM to make sense of more than 400 charity feedback responses every month, despite having no background in data analysis. Meanwhile, the volunteer manager used AI to help write code that now coordinates more than 100 volunteers’ schedules.

Creating internal champions helped FoodCloud spread knowledge organically across the organisation, one use case at a time, and encouraged staff to explore how they could use AI to assist them in their everyday work.

Patience over pace

Toledo is clear that cultural change can take longer than technological change. “This is more a people project than a technology project,” she says. “You need to be patient and understand that people have their own nine-to-five. We try to show them: this is how you do your task today, and this is how you could do it with AI.”

Enterprise Ireland support helped FoodCloud strengthen the foundations behind this work, from funding to modernise its data infrastructure to guidance on AI legislation. That gave the organisation a stronger base for safe, practical adoption.

Today, FoodCloud has a strong team of AI champions which continues to assess where technology can make a genuine difference. Beyond simplifying daily tasks, its human-first strategy is helping build a lasting culture of collective problem-solving. 

It’s a mindset that will be vital as FoodCloud pushes toward its goal of redistributing one billion meals by 2030.

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