The Agentic Fairy Godmother: Granting Wishes at Scale | Make-A-Wish | Dreamforce 2026

Please welcome Chief Operating Officer of Make-A-Wish UK, Jamie Dormandy, and VP of Strategic Relationships at Salesforce, Hydra Mendoza. Good morning, everyone. How are you, Jamie?

Very well, thanks. Great to see everybody here at Dreamfest. It's my first time and it's amazing.

It's been fantastic, right?

Something else.

Yeah, a much larger version than our world tour in England, yes?

Yeah, well, yeah, I was at the world tour in London and, uh, yeah, I thought that was huge. So my mind was blown when I arrived here.

Well, I want to welcome all of you. I'm Hydra Mendoza. I'm a VP here doing, uh, for the Chief Strategic Relationships in the Office of the CEO. And I'm so delighted to be here with Jamie Dormandy from Make-A-Wish UK. He's one of our fantastic Accelerator Program grantees, and you've been doing some fantastic work. And, you know, we're huge fans of Make-A-Wish. Salesforce has invested $3 million on a 3-year relationship with Make-A-Wish US, and we just could not be more delighted. And so we're really thrilled to have you here today to talk about your fairy godmother that you've created that's going to help you to scale what it is that you want to do. But before we go into the tech, Jamie, let's talk a little bit about the why and tell me a little bit about the Make-A-Wish UK. How large are your wishes that you're making, the number of kids that you're serving, and then why this is so important for you to want to scale up?

Sure, it's a real Real privilege to be here, and look, being told that your child has been diagnosed with a critical illness is the news that no parent wants to hear, no family wants to hear, right? Playgrounds and parks and parties are swapped with hospital beds, waiting rooms, and what should be a carefree childhood is put at risk, right? So our wish is there to rebuild 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 rebuild hope in the future, allow children to dream again, and create joyful moments with families that are really irreplaceable. In the UK, we're granting more wishes than ever before, which is great news, right? Over 1,000 every year. But we're still only reaching 1 in 10 children who are eligible for a wish. So our imperative is scale.

Yeah.

How do we reach the 9 in 10 we're not currently granting a wish for?

Yeah.

And so the opportunities that Agentic AI holds for us is huge. And that's what we've been working on with Salesforce, I'm pleased to say.

Yeah. And I think that's so important because if you're already in a situation where you're— you have this illness, your family's experiencing it, and you have this opportunity to get this wish granted, and only a few are selected because of the capacity that you haven't been able to quite build yet, that makes it really difficult.

It does. Um, we like a challenge though, and, uh, I, I think seeing the impact of a wish, um, seeing the child going, going from a situation where things are being taken away, life is, is reduced, uh, for that period, uh, 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 then coming true.

Yeah.

Has a huge impact. We love to tell the stories and we evidence that impact with wellbeing measures. So I'll tell you a few of the stories later. They're the things that people hold on to and remember. But evidencing that impact is really important for us as well with trusted wellbeing measures.

Yes.

And so we see those coming through, and the impact of a wish is really significant in that respect.

Yeah. And I think you already know this, but, you know, our founder Mark Benioff and his wife Lynn are deeply engaged in children's health. So our Benioff Children's Hospitals here in Oakland and San Francisco have their namesake on it. I'm going to do a shameless plug. We have Dreamfest tonight. We're raising a lot of money for the hospitals, and we hope you all come out and and donate. But we've also done, you know, things with CHOA, the Children's Hospital of Atlanta, and Hasbro Children's Hospital, and the V Foundation, who's, and, you know, looking at childhood research and their health. Tell me a little bit about how you think about scaling. I mean, how do we not have this just in the UK in your office, but how do we make this more largely accessible? accessible to everyone?

Yeah, I'd love to. And look, Make-A-Wish was born in the USA. So like Salesforce, it's a fine export that we're really grateful for. The first wish was granted in Phoenix, Arizona. A boy called Chris Grecious, he was 7 at the time, wanted to be a police officer when he grew up. Sadly, due to his diagnosis, that was not possible. But thanks to the generosity and the response of his local community, he did become a police officer. He was a police officer for a day. He had the uniform, went up in a helicopter. I think he even made an arrest. And the way that the community responded actually spurred on a movement.

Mm-hmm.

Became Make-A-Wish in the US. Now we grant wishes in over 50 countries around the world. Last year, more than 33,000 wishes were granted for children with critical illnesses in those countries. So we're really grateful for where it started and that, that, that origin. But it also gives us an opportunity. We share a brand, we share an evidence base, areas of best practice. But because we've started at different points in time, we're at different points in our digital development.

Right.

So many affiliates and chapters use Salesforce, but different instances. And I guess the case for shared digital infrastructure across our organization globally has always been a question.

Yeah.

And actually, the digital tool part probably isn't the hardest nut to crack. It's, it's getting the people all on the same page and, and, and, um, agreeing to do things differently to make things better. Um, but now with the advent of agentic AI, I think it, it becomes irresistible. Um, the case becomes more and more compelling, right, uh, to do that. So, um, we'd love to explore that more. We'd love to share the— what we've done in the UK, uh, with, with other countries, with Make-A-Wish America here. And we'd love the support of the Salesforce community to do that.

Yeah. You know, when I think about how I use AI in my own space, because we're, you know, giving contributions on a regular basis as well, whether they're sponsorships or donations or partnerships or matching kids to certain hospitals or doing the kinds of things that we do, the ability to be able to take what it is that I do on a regular basis and make that kind of go away a little bit so that I have time to do this. and to spend the time with the kids. I mean, we did 4, 3 or 4 send-offs for our Wish kids. And—

Wow.

I mean, it was just one of the most magical things. And when you were talking about the young, you know, the young person that had the arrest, we had— I don't know if any of you are here from San Francisco, but we did a Batkid many years ago, and he basically shut down the city. It was fantastic, wasn't it? And at the end of the day, he captured the Joker, he ran up City Hall steps, and he had the Joker wrapped up. And what a feeling that young man had of conquering something when he was experiencing this illness that was just taking over his life. And so you're right, the impact is enormous. And I think that's really part of what our Accelerator Program is is for, right? We wanna take the nonprofits who are challenged by resources, by capacity, by time, and make things a little bit easier for them. What has our Accelerator program meant to you?

So innovation is hard. It's especially hard in a nonprofit environment where you're in Horizon 1, right? A lot of the time, my experience is that 90-95% of our time is spent filling the financial envelope.

Yeah.

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. And the Accelerator Program has, has helped us do that in a way that I don't think would've been possible without it. So it's given us funding, so we've been able to, uh, release, uh, people's time within our organization to, to focus on the Agentic AI solution that we've been building. It's given us Salesforce products, so enhanced licensing to take advantage of the latest features. And crucially, it's given us capability. So the pro bono volunteers from Salesforce have worked hand in glove with our own team.

Yeah.

Come alongside them. And it's been really beautiful to see actually our Salesforce volunteers be truly inspired by the mission, as you described it, and really go for those human outcomes with our team. And I'd say all 3 things have worked together as a package to create this space for innovation. But 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.

Yeah, that's fantastic. You know, we've, we've— one of our main values is around trust, but our 1-to-1-to-1, which we talk about on a regular basis, Mark mentioned it in his keynote yesterday, you know, it's really about resources. It's about volunteer time. It's about product. And we want to be able to bring all 3 of those together to organizations to help them build capacity and to help them be able to do what it is that large businesses do on a regular basis. Right.

Yeah.

And so this— that part, I think, has been really important. I— when I— when this whole thing came up, I was getting a number of different phone calls saying, oh, they're doing a whole thing on you as the fairy godmother. I'm like, no, it's an Engentic fairy godmother, not, not the ones that are able to give money away the way that we do. So this is phenomenal, and I had the opportunity to see your, your demo the other night, and I was just watching the audience because as he was clicking through and the ability to get to the things that he needed to find without looking at spreadsheets on a regular basis or finding who that person was that had mentioned that there was this hotel that was similar to a Harry Potter story, or, you know, like all these things, all these resources where people want to donate, where people want to hear these stories, be part of all this, but it's all in some random way of keeping it. Or you're talking to somebody and gives you a kind of a coincidence opportunity. Oh, I heard about this person that can help you do that. How is it that your fairy godmother, your Agentic Fairy Godmother, is helping you bring all that together? And if you could kind of also put that in an example of like what a, what a wish can get built out to be, because we get some of the most astonishing wishes from young people and some of them are simple. We had a young person that wanted to go to Diggertown. He just wanted— he was a truck kid. And he just want— and I said, oh wow, I've never heard of Diggertown. Where's that? New Jersey. It was in New Jersey. His parents were like, maybe we can also go to New York while we're in New Jersey. But, you know, they've got in their head what it is that is going to make them happy. So tell us a little bit about how you now think about all those things coming together, where you can take the wish and turn it into nearly everything they want compared to the way you were doing it before?

Well, I guess the way that we were doing it before started with happy coincidences, like, like you said. So I remember my first week at Make-A-Wish, uh, going back a few years now, um, I just overheard a conversation in the kitchen. Uh, 2 of our team were making a cup of tea, yeah, as we do in the UK. brewing it properly. So I had, you know, a good few minutes, and one of our wish-granting team, Sophie, was talking about a wish she was trying to grant. And it was quite a simple one as well. A boy wanted just to go fishing with his dad. That was it. That was, that was his wish. It's not a very common wish. We don't get many fishing wishes. But the person Sophie was talking to had granted something similar a few years back. And so there was a data point on a spreadsheet somewhere, maybe, um, that indicated that we had a, a generous supporter with a holiday lodge next to a fishing lake. But had it not been for that conversation, the few minutes while the tea was brewing, that wouldn't have happened.

Right.

So that, that got us thinking, how do we go from the coincidental to the repeatable and the inevitable outcomes that we want to achieve every time at scale. And that got us onto, well, what does an agentic solution look like? And that's where our agentic fairy godmother comes in. So shall I explain what it does?

Please. It's fascinating.

It does 2 amazing things for us. So first of all, it's able to summarize the content of what a child is wishing for. That comes in many dimensions of data. So 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 stuff that comes straight from the child's imagination. I would like to ride into my princess party on a unicorn. So, you know, very different types of data there.

Yeah.

And so our agentic solution is able to sift through all of that, work on the semantics, and bring forward to our wish granter, the human in the loop at that point, a recommendation or a set of recommendations for what that wish could be.

Yeah.

So if I give an example here, we had a wish for a boy called Dylan. He wanted to have a weekend enjoying lots of the Christmas festivities in London, lots of sightseeing, and within that, go to the Harry Potter Studios. He was a big Harry Potter fan. And the thing that really made his eyes light up for that wish was walking into a hotel and feeling like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2, Lost in New York, I think it is, isn't it? Where he walks into this luxurious hotel. And that was the picture that Dylan had in his mind.

Yeah.

So our agentic solution, the agentic fairy godmother, is 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. So 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 Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2.

Yeah.

It recommended a hotel we have a partnership with, the Savoy in London. If anyone's been there, lucky you. It's a beautiful place and it meets that description.

Ooh.

So it brought specifically that recommendation out. And again, the human is in the loop here, our wish granter. It saves them 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 wishes. We're not leaving anything on the table. We're able to fully utilize all those offers that our kind donors and partners have given us, but they're not lost, you know, in the dregs of a spreadsheet.

Right.

They're surfaced in a really intuitive way for our wish granters to pick, select, and then grant the wish. in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost as well.

Right.

So we're able to grant more wishes and in a way that's truly scalable. So now there's no, there's no ceiling. We can add as many gift-in-kind donors, supporters to our database with those specific offers. And the agent does the hard work for us. It surfaces those. And rather than the happy coincidence at the water cooler or while the tea is brewing, we're able to just grant those wishes. So at MVP, so when the solution's live, we know that we'll at least get a 50% time saving for our wish granters in that process. We'll be able to utilize 55% more gifts in kind. And so the inverse of that is—

Amazing.

Is that there's a cost saving on every wish, which enables us our fundraised income to go that much further.

Yeah.

But fundamentally, it's scalable. It'll learn as we go. So those stats are just the beginning.

Yeah. And that's fantastic to be able to take those resources that you're saving to be able to put it in the wishes that, you know, you might need to have to pay for because, because there isn't an in-kind. But the idea that all of your donors and all of the resources that they have are located in one place and it's a click, click, click makes a huge difference. One of the things that you all do wonderfully is you give us a profile on the kids, and we, you know, get to see what kind of food they like and what kind of toys they like or what their favorite colors are. And we've used that to go and shop for them when we do our send-off. But I have to tell you, it's challenging to kind of decide, you know, like on Amazon, what you think is appropriate and what's not appropriate. And I think this is a wonderful way to be able to kind of give us more clarity on what are the things that we should pay attention to that he may have or she may have said to you that really highlights what's going to make their wish even more special. So that part I think has just been fantastic to have. So if we're thinking about granting wishes at scale, so you were doing 1 out of 10. How many do you want to do now that you've— with your fairy godmother?

So immediately it enables us to double our impact. So that's pretty astonishing, like I say, at release. But the really important thing here is scale. And not just— it's not just a numbers game, right? And I think that the conversation about AI for nonprofits can slide down that slope if we're not careful. But ultimately, we're about impact, right?

Yeah.

And that's, that's much more than just a number. Each one of these is a child whose well-being we're supporting through, through wishes. So if it just becomes about efficiency, then I think we're, we're leaving a whole load of opportunity behind. And actually, it can be a whole load more than that. So 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 in the future for a child to playfully interact with their wish ideas themselves.

Yeah.

Like a lot of organizations, the place we started with AI is more internally. and driving these efficiencies like I've mentioned. But actually, it's not a race to the bottom with this, right? It's these human outcomes that we're trying to deliver should be a spiral upwards. So we'd love to see something that's child-facing ultimately in this space.

Yeah.

That enables a child to playfully interact with their wish ideas, and give them options, give them agency. We find that the, the core elements of the impact of a wish are a child rebuilding hope and regaining agency. So giving them the opportunity to do that as they design their own wish, Yeah. as, as what I described for our internal team, become something that a child interacts with themselves and gets to put in those beautiful little details that make their eyes light up. That's where we'd love to get to. And yes, it'll give us— this solution gives us the volume, but also I think it gives us the opportunity to create even more impact in that way.

Yeah, I mean, I love this opportunity to really focus on giving the child the, you know, the agency, having that child have control, right? Because right now they have no control. And, and to be able to say, no, not this one, this one. Oh, I like the way that looks, but I'm not sure about that one. And you can iterate quickly without having to bring a bunch of stuff in or, you know, like, let us get back to you on that, because it's all in one place.

Yeah.

And so that's a, that's a wonderful thing. And I love that the, you know, the child is in the center. But you've also said something previously, which I love, which is this idea that this can help nonprofits move from a mindset of survival to one of solutions. And, you know, I was in government, I was in nonprofit. I know what the scarcity felt like. It always, you know, you had to be really careful with every single dime and your time. in a way that was really challenging. And I can remember, like, wanting to make sure I was always at work because if I wasn't there, then that means they weren't going to get something, right? So, but now with this idea of changing the mindset of solutions-oriented instead of scarcity, um, it's huge. What does that mean for your team?

Well, I think we're in a moment right now where that's It's possible to do that. It's possible to move from a scarcity mindset to a more of an abundance, a solutions mindset because of agentic AI. If we're not careful, it can, you know, the pressure is to do things cheaper and do things faster.

Right.

And they're the table stakes, right? So that's the ticket to the game. Doesn't help you to win the game. It doesn't improve those human outcomes that we're all here for. So when we move from just doing more with less to actually what is it we're doing, how are we improving these human outcomes, that's huge for us. And I think what we found is even if you start with efficiency, if you're thinking about the human outcomes, the opportunities are there.

Yeah.

So for us and our team, it's a culture— it is a culture shift. There is more enablement. than direct delivery. And I think that is a culture shift for nonprofits as we utilize more of these tools. But with that gives the, the end user, the beneficiary, in our case, the child, much more agency. And so the culture shift for us will be how our team are still inspired by the impact they're making, but their jobs will change to be much more enabling so that we can reach more children at scale.

Yeah. And, you know, that's when the wish itself becomes even more memorable.

Yeah.

And I want to circle back to what that means to you because you've seen many, many wishes over the many years. And I want to just understand what keeps you grounded and what was the most amazing wish that you've had to be able to be part of?

Thanks for the question, and it is absolutely those memories, those stories of wishes that keeps me grounded. And I think for all of us, you know, across sectors actually, it's, it's the impact of what we do that spurs us on and on a tough day helps us, helps us lift our eyes up. So I'll share the story of George's wish. George was 4 when he was diagnosed with Batten disease, which is degenerative. And him and his mum Claire made a bucket list. He called it a bucket and spade list because he loved going to the seaside.

Yeah, he's 4.

He's 4. So they had their bucket and spade list, and on that list was to go on holiday and go tobogganing. George was a thrill seeker at 4 years old, wanted to be, you know, hurtling down the hillside on a toboggan. And it took us a few months to grant the wish. Sadly, over those few months, he stopped speaking. So partly because of the physical, partly because of the emotional impact, he hadn't said a word. His wish went ahead and they went to Austria on this beautiful holiday and they were on this toboggan, George and Claire, the wind rushing through their hair. Hurtling down the countryside, and George said, "Wee!" Oh, he spoke after months. Oh, he spoke, and his mum Claire said, "Are you okay?" And he just said, "I'm okay, Mum." One of our donors had gifted them a video camera, so Claire had this on camera and. has that memory now forever. It gives me goosebumps still just telling the story, but that really reminds me of the impact that these wishes have.

Yeah.

And actually spurs me on to think, well, actually it's not the 1 in 10, it's the 10 out of 10 that we want to be delivering.

That's right. And we got to get all 10 of those out, you know, on a regular basis. I remember the young child that we got to spend some time with. We threw a little party for him up on the Ohana floor, and we had all of his favorite food, and one of it was just cheese pizza. And afterwards, his mom came to me and she said, He has not eaten in weeks, and he's devouring this pizza. And it was like this super simple thing that we paid attention to that made that all of our— all of us just made us cry and feel so wonderful that he was eating and it was something that he thoroughly enjoyed. As much as I would love to end on a happy note on all of the amazing wishes you're doing, so many of our audience members are developers, people in nonprofit. What's your best advice to them as we wrap up?

I would say, look, we're at a moment of great opportunity where we have a huge amount of agency. So my advice 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 the table stakes. Do things cheaper, do things faster. Yes, they're the ticket to the game. The business case always needs to stack up. That 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 nonprofit, government agency, or a business, inspiring teams with those human outcomes will help us lead through a time of a lot of uncertainty, right? And focusing on that purpose is the advice that I would give to people leading teams. Yeah.

Jamie, thank you so much for the incredible work that you and your team are doing. We're looking forward to the Accelerator program sharing everything that you've been doing so that we can have all of our Make-A-Wish programs on this. Please join me in thanking Jamie Dormandy from the UK Make-A-Wish Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for all the support that Salesforce have given as well.

Oh, it's so lovely to meet you.