#100 - Solving Problems With AI Innovation| Don Barger
From Ministry At Scale by Chad Williams - Five Q
June 12, 2026 · 26 min · Season 5 · Episode 100
About this episode
Don Barger discusses how AI innovation transformed the International Mission Board's approach to evangelism.
What does a hotel key card have to do with 400,000 people hearing the gospel? Don Barger , Director of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence at the International Mission Board (IMB) , shares the unexpected story of how one small, tangible idea helped one of the world's largest missions organizations go from AI skepticism to full-scale adoption — in just a few years. Key Takeaways Easy wins change everything. The IMB's first AI pilots were deliberately small — translation of internal communications, a digital responder, and donor processing — and those quick wins gave skeptics something real to believe in before any large-scale rollout began. A few hundred NFC cards sparked 25,000 chatbot conversations. Don distributed programmed NFC cards at a single event, and within days, 25,000 people had tapped in and engaged with the IMB's AI chatbot — a result that came from one simple, low-cost idea. FaithBot was built for triage — and became a global evangelism tool. Originally designed to protect digital responders from high-volume, low-quality traffic, FaithBot now has over 400,000 users worldwide across multiple languages, spreading largely through organic, word-of-mouth sharing…
People in this episode
Host: Chad Williams
Guest: Don Barger
Topics covered
- AI innovation
- evangelism
- leadership
- technology adoption
- mission organizations
Keywords
- AI
- evangelism
- International Mission Board
- chatbot
- leadership
- innovation
- NFC cards
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: International Mission Board, IMB, MIT Sloan
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