Velir Wins Awards for AI and Nonprofit Work at Acquia Engage

Recently I joined the Velir team at the first stop of Acquia’s 2023–2024 Digital Freedom tour in Boston for two packed days of thought-provoking keynote talks and breakout sessions led by industry experts and practitioners. There was a lot to be excited about, including two awards that Velir won in this year’s Acquia Innovation Awards, and my participation in the event’s keynote.

Not only was Acquia Engage Boston full of content about Acquia’s products and the different opportunities we have as we go into 2024, but our team was recognized as Acquia’s 2023 AI Innovation Partner of the Year and as Leaders of the Pack for our work in the Non-Profit sector with Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

The Leaders of the Pack award celebrates the organizations at the forefront of innovation in designing and delivering world-class digital experiences for customers, employees, constituents, and students. Acquia recognizes leaders in Financial Services, Health, Higher Education, Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Utilities, Media and Entertainment, NGO or Non-Profit, Public Sector, Retail and Commerce, Technology, and Travel and Transportation. We were honored to win this award in the Non-Profit sector, where we competed against work for finalists like Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the United Nations' global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, and BJC, one of the largest nonprofit healthcare organizations in the United States, which delivers services to residents primarily in the greater St. Louis and southern Illinois areas.

Acquia Engage Boston also featured an innovation showcase keynote highlighting the great work being done to enhance the Drupal and Acquia ecosystem of solutions. The main topic of this keynote was our future with artificial intelligence (AI) and enhanced customer experiences. 

The keynote started by introducing the possibilities artificial intelligence presents for assisting content creation in Drupal. I was thrilled Acquia CTO and Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, and SVP of DXP product at Acquia, Deanna Ballew invited me on stage with them to give insight into what content creation with AI could look like in Drupal and to discuss our work with the popular ChatGPT integration module we built for Drupal 10. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

Dries: Can you tell us a bit about what inspired the integration of OpenAI/ChatGPT with Drupal? Why did you create it? 

Me: Certainly. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released ChatGPT to the public a year ago. It was an instant overnight hit. Even though AI itself has been in R&D since 1956, this was the first time the public could sense the magic and potential of where AI can take us. We thought it would be interesting to integrate ChatGPT into Drupal to accelerate content entry and management. The response so far has been incredible. 

Dries: What do you see in the potential of generative AI, especially for content creators? 

Me: Generative AI has massive potential to help accelerate content management tasks, for example, generating text for ideas if you have writer's block, summarizing long blocks of text into concise sections, translating text into any language, generating images for your content, converting typed documents to audio and vice versa. All these features and more will help content creators deliver content to end users faster and increase the volume of what they can accomplish in a day. 

Dries: How long have you been working on this? 

Me: We began developing the module last January and have been keeping up with the additions to the OpenAI ChatGPT suite of products. Last week we added an interface to convert text into speech, for example, and released a new version of the module with that and other features. 

Dries: Is the module available now? What do you need to use it? 

Me: Yes, the OpenAI module is available today for Drupal 10. It is completely free to download, extend, and use. All you need is an API key from OpenAI. 

During the keynote, we also had an opportunity to demonstrate ChatGPT in Drupal 10 on stage with Dries and show the audience how much AI can accelerate content creation. We revealed how quickly a new page of content can come together with just a few ideas, assisted by ChatGPT.  

How You Can Leverage the OpenAI ChatGPT Module for Drupal 10

We had a great time at Acquia Engage 2023 in Boston! We were thrilled to win Acquia’s 2023 AI Innovation Partner of the Year and their Leaders of the Pack award for our work in the Non-Profit sector, and I was honored to participate in the event’s innovation showcase keynote. Regardless of whether you were able to attend the event to see how AI can accelerate content creation, there are a lot of exciting ways you can revolutionize the process in Drupal 10 with our OpenAI ChatGPT Module.

The OpenAI ChatGPT module for Drupal 10 is available now and all that’s required is an API key from OpenAI. You can get more details on getting it set up on the module project page. As of this writing, it’s the most popular ChatGPT integration for Drupal, amassing over 100 stars and over 439 reported installs in Drupal. We’ll be writing more about the latest features in the coming weeks. 

Get the Drupal 10 Development Cookbook 

The "Drupal 10 Development Cookbook" is co-authored by Matt Glaman and me, Kevin Quillen. We cover a wide variety of topics with hands-on examples so you can get up and running with Drupal 10 in no time. These topics include running Drupal locally with Docker-based tools, content modeling, creating custom modules, how to do automated testing, and migrating data into Drupal from various data sources. The book will help you understand how to develop and build modules just like the ones we talk about often at Velir.  

You can pick up the book on Amazon as a physical copy or for Kindle. 

Want to know more about how features like AI and ChatGPT can transform your content creation in Drupal? Reach out.