A leading pediatric research institution turned to Forum Solutions to address a costly but largely invisible problem: the way funding is discovered pulls passionate researchers away from the science they are driven to advance. Finding the right grant opportunities is administrative work that takes more of their time than it should, and that time is better spent on research. Forum paired AI strategy with hands-on product, design, and prototype delivery, giving leadership both a clear view of where AI creates differentiated value and a working solution that proved it.
Challenge
Every hour a researcher spends searching for funding is an hour taken away from research itself.
Research institutions depend on a diverse mix of competitive funding, including federal agencies, private foundations, professional societies, and institutional programs, to sustain their scientific work. Finding the right opportunity, however, is a time-intensive process, and every hour a researcher spends searching portals and reviewing eligibility criteria is an hour taken away from research itself. The challenge compounds over time: as researchers complete studies, publish, and build new skills and capabilities, they become qualified for a broader range of grant opportunities, many of which they may never see.
At this institution, that dynamic played out across a fragmented funding landscape. Opportunities were scattered across grant portals, newsletters, professional societies, and private foundations, and discovery depended on personal networks, mentors, and individual experience. Administrative teams supported researchers where they could, but there was no formal, scalable way to match investigators with opportunities aligned to their expertise, career stage, and research goals. Private foundations, where discovery is the least structured, were the most likely to be missed.
The institution needed more than a faster way to find funding. Leadership wanted to use AI to streamline the process and create meaningful, differentiated value, while earning the trust of researchers and administrators accustomed to traditional keyword search.
Approach
Our team worked alongside researchers, research administrators, and technical stakeholders to define the use case and prioritize it against business value and feasibility. We then optimized current workflows for automation and AI, translated business needs into product and technical requirements, built an AI agent, and tested our assumptions early through hands-on usability sessions.
Leadership gained a clear, decision-ready path to responsible production deployment.
Discovery surfaced the insight that shaped everything that followed: users valued relevance and prioritization far more than a larger volume of results. A longer list of opportunities would only repeat the problem researchers already had. That finding drove our matching strategy and our decision to show users why each opportunity was recommended, so that trust was designed into the experience from the start.
Building on that insight, Forum designed and delivered a working AI-powered grant matching agent that matches multiple funding sources with researcher expertise profiles to generate personalized recommendations. It was built as a decision-support tool, keeping human judgment central while removing the manual search burden. Key capabilities included:
Aggregation of funding opportunities from federal, foundation, society, and institutional sources.
Automated researcher profiles built from publications and prior funded work, so recommendations evolve as researchers' expertise grows.
AI-powered semantic matching between researchers and opportunities.
Bidirectional matching that supports both researcher and administrative workflows.
Explainable recommendations that show users why an opportunity was suggested.
Human review and governance controls that promote trust and transparency.
This engagement drew on Forum's AI Strategy and Enablement service line, which brings strategy, product, design, technology, and change management together under one team. Because these disciplines work side by side instead of in sequence, the institution got a cohesive path from AI strategy to working solution, and results it could see and use. Forum brought together:
AI strategy and responsible AI adoption
Product strategy and requirements management
Stakeholder engagement and facilitation
Human-centered design and usability testing
Solution architecture and prototype development
Change enablement and adoption planning
Results
Forum delivered a validated AI-powered grant matching agent and an actionable foundation for moving the use case beyond experimentation. Business priorities, user needs, solution design, technical architecture, governance, and adoption planning were aligned in one coherent plan, giving leadership a clear, decision-ready path to responsible production deployment. The engagement produced:
A working AI-powered grant matching agent
Product requirements and design documentation
Usability testing findings and recommendations
Solution architecture guidance
Governance and adoption recommendations
A product roadmap for future enhancement and production deployment planning
The institution now has a scalable way to return time to researchers and to put more of the right funding opportunities in front of them as their expertise grows. It also has a repeatable approach for evaluating, governing, and enabling additional AI opportunities. By pairing relevance, explainability, and human-centered workflows with disciplined execution, Forum turned strategy into lasting results.
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