With a focus on preparing today for the West Virginia of tomorrow, the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative at WVU, the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, and Amazon Web Services have awarded $45,000 in grant funding and promotional credits to aid initiatives focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and emerging technologies to enhance education, healthcare, and economic development in the Mountain State.
Focus Forward: Minds and Machines hosted over 600 leaders from across West Virginia and neighboring states to look at how emerging technology will continue to redefine the economy, work, education, policy, and even how we develop as humans.
The funding, available exclusively to attendees of the conference, encouraged collaboration to turn conference insights into impact in communities across West Virginia.
“Focus Forward is meant to drive change by collectively discussing a future that is full of opportunity,” Jen Giovannitti, president of the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, said. “The Foundation has seen so much success and momentum building at the annual Focus Forward conference that it became a natural place to pilot additional grant making.”
Giovannitti noted the highly engaged leaders from all sectors that attend Focus Forward to network, share ideas, learn, and grow.
“Those are precisely the extraordinary people Benedum seeks to fund with innovation grants.”
Grant funding will be used to support all areas of implementation of each project, while AWS Promotional Credits will provide digital vouchers used to access the vast library of global, cloud-based products for development, management, storage, and more through Amazon Web Services.
The recipients of this year’s innovation grant awards and AWS credits include:
Huntington Analytics in partnership with Advantage Valley Inc. — Advantage Valley AI Executive Assistant Pilot for West Virginia Small Businesses, $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, and $5,000 in Benedum Foundation grant funding
Huntington Analytics, a corporation that develops data and market research tools for the next generation of media and sentiment analysis, and Advantage Valley Inc., a regional economic development organization whose mission is to grow economic opportunity in the Charleston-Huntington Metro Area, are partnering to launch an AI executive assistant pilot designed to help West Virginia small business owners reduce administrative demands and operate more efficiently.
Described as “Minds and Machines applied to Main Street,” the initiative will provide five to eight small businesses in Advantage Valley’s nine-county region with access to a Claude-powered AI executive assistant.
The assistant will help participating businesses manage routine tasks such as email organization, calendar coordination, note-taking, invoice drafting, outcome reporting, and other day-to-day administrative responsibilities. Businesses representing a variety of industries and stages of growth will be considered for the pilot.
Neurowired in partnership with the WVU School of Medicine — Cloud-Enabled Digital Twins for Continuous Remote Rural Care, $5,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, and $5,000 in Benedum Foundation grant funding
Rural communities in West Virginia face disproportionately high rates of cardiovascular disease and chronic disability, compounded by limited access to continuous monitoring and specialty care. Neurowired, a Morgantown-based tech company that specializes in innovative, biomimetic human-machine interfaces, the WVU School of Medicine Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, have partnered to create a cloud-enabled platform that integrates multimodal health data to deliver quality care and close monitoring to patients, no matter where they live in the Mountain State.
The project aims to break down barriers to access often caused by geographic isolation, lack of transportation, and healthcare workforce shortages by enabling continuous, home-based monitoring of cardiovascular and functional health, and supporting early detection, personalized care, and improved quality of life in underserved rural communities.
STEMpact WV Corporation in partnership with Design-Build-Live — RAISE Appalachia: Rural AI Skills & Engagement for Appalachia, $10,000 in Benedum Foundation grant funding
The STEMpact WV Corporation, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering Appalachian youth through hands-on STEM and robotics education, and Design-Build-Live, a West Virginia design-build practice serving West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. for two decades, have partnered to establish Rural AI Skills and Engagement to help rural students and community members build AI fluency, confidence, and future-ready skills while strengthening support for STEM education and workforce development.
R.A.I.S.E. Appalachia will expand access to meaningful AI learning experiences in the Potomac Highlands by ensuring that rural West Virginians are prepared to participate in — and help shape — the state’s technology-driven future through workshops, workforce partnerships, and community outreach and awareness.
Center for Business and Economics Research at Marshall University — Using Machine Learning to Create Real-Time Economic Estimates for West Virginia, $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credits
The Center for Business and Economics Research at Marshall University will bring the practice of estimating the current state of the economy in real time to West Virginia through the Nowcast® system, a revolutionary, patent-pending technology that combines sophisticated econometrics with Big Data, data mining, and machine learning that estimates current economic conditions before official data is released.
The project will allow West Virginia policymakers, state agencies, economic development organizations, workforce partners, businesses, academic researchers, and community leaders to access timely economic information as needed.
These four projects were selected from nearly two dozen applications received following the 2026 Focus Forward conference.
“The WVPEC is grateful to the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and AWS for supporting initiatives that move ideas from this year’s conference forward,” Donna Peduto, executive director of the WVPEC, said. “We challenged this year’s attendees to take what they learned during the conference and create actionable change, and we are thrilled by the response.”
Recipients of this year’s funding will be featured during the 2027 Focus Forward conference.
The conference is supported in partnership with the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative, West Virginia University, and Marshall University.