AWS Summit DC 2026 | Kwamane Liddell, ThriveLink & Kat Esser, Impact Accelerators

Clips
More from AWS Summit DC 2026

Kwamane Liddell

Co-Founder & CEO

ThriveLink

Kat Esser

Principal of Social Impact

AWS

play_circle_outline AWS Social Impact Accelerator: Building Cloud Data Lakes and AI with 24/7 Human-in-the-Loop for Nonprofits

play_circle_outline Human in the Loop Clinical AI: Training on Calls and Clinician Input to Scale from 4 to 18 States

play_circle_outline Scaling Equitable Technology for Social Good Through Cohorts, Ecosystem Collaboration, and Shared Capabilities

play_circle_outline Accelerator Cohorts and AWS: Building Interoperable Tool Ecosystems for Scalable Nonprofit Impact

play_circle_outline Security, interoperability, and AWS infrastructure enabling partnerships with hospitals and governments

play_circle_outline Scaling Healthcare Screening and Referrals with Compliant Security Infrastructure and Institutional Partnerships

Info

Kwamane Liddell, ThriveLink & Kat Esser, Impact Accelerators

Kwamane Liddell

Co-Founder & CEO ThriveLink

Kat Esser

Principal of Social Impact AWS

search

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here live on the ground in Washington, D.C. for AWS Summit 2026. We are bringing you all the live action, talking to some of the best minds and brain trusts building this next paradigm of AWS. One thing that we need to remember is that some of AI's biggest breakthroughs won't necessarily happen in boardrooms. They will happen in communities. And for conversation on exactly that, joining me now is Kwamane Liddell from ThriveLink and Kat Esser from AWS Social Impact. Welcome, guys.

Kat Esser

>> Thank you.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Thank you.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm going to be honest, when I saw this brief, I was like, "I love this," because I love using technology for social good, right? What is there not to love about that? I want to hear about the accelerator and I want to hear about ThriveLink, so first, maybe Kat, talk to me about what you built at AWS Social Impact and what you saw in ThriveLink.

Kat Esser

>> It's actually what our customers built for us and showed us that there was a need that we could fill with our technology that we hadn't really thought of, which is, how might we take social impact customers, use our technology lever of cloud and AI and actually train them to use that to build solutions, help strengthen their businesses, and also make impact at scale for the communities that they serve? We started an accelerator program in 2025 which was inviting different organizations like ThriveLink to come and really kind of mature on their cloud journey and be able to be in a cohort with their peers from all over the world that are doing really hard work solving problems in health, education and climate.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Kwamane, tell me your origin story, the background to ThriveLink.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. Background, I'm an emergency department nurse-

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Kwamane Liddell

>> ... and I jokingly say that I was a travel nurse before it became cool. In experiencing that, I got to see all these different communities and the resource differences that people would experience. While working in the Alameda Health System, which is the health system in Oakland, the county health system for Oakland, there were so many families that didn't need more healthcare, they needed food, housing, transportation, and we knew that they existed in the community. We started out as a nonprofit. I drug my brother in to help me where we would just voluntarily help people sign up and do paperwork. As that began to scale and we thought about how do we support more people, it was a perfect timing where we thought about, how do we build a phone system where the families that we support who, they didn't have internet, it was hard for them to get on the bus and get places all the time, but it started out as just a recorded phone line where people would answer questions for SNAP, which is food benefits, and we would write down that information. It's been a transformative experience where now we build AI agents that get to talk to people about all kinds of things and help them access food, housing, healthcare and more.

Gemma Allen

>> There's so much to unpack there in terms of how technology is so instrumental really in shaping lives, right? But accessing that technology, because there's a whole "You don't know what you don't know" element to life and society, so what you built, I love it. It's a great story. Talk me through some examples of some lives or some use cases of this technology, if there's any story you could bring to life for us.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah, yeah. I'll tell two quick ones. One of them was a hospital system. The way that the world works right now is people go to the emergency departments when they're sick. Then oftentimes they're not sick enough to stay in the hospital and they need additional support when they leave, and hospitals, it's just really hard for them to have the capacity to do that. So we worked with a hospital system in North Carolina where they saw this problem. Families come into their hospitals that need food. Our AI agents now deliver food to everyone who says they're food-insecure. They get a week of groceries. What we learned from that was that there's a family and now so many families that, they have full-time jobs, they work all the time, but because they were sick, they fell behind on some of their bills and utilities and things like that. So we were able to help a family. The use case that told us to start helping with energy assistance, we were able to help a mom who, she was sick herself, but she missed work and her utilities were going to be turned off. Our system talked to her in the middle of the night and talked to the government and turned her lights on for her and her children. This was something that we now see that impacts families all over the country who are living paycheck to paycheck, but they're just having a harder time because they got sick or they had to miss work for some other reason.

Gemma Allen

>> All we ever are is the output of time and circumstance, right?

Kwamane Liddell

>> Mm-hmm.

Gemma Allen

>> Kat, let's talk about the technologies that we're building, right? What are you seeing here across the gamut of this accelerator? Are we talking about voice assistance, ranking data for the purpose of creating forms? Give me some examples of what such technology we're building in the accelerator. Are you seeing folks build on the AWS stack that's feeding into that?

Kat Esser

>> I would call it extraordinary basics. There's this theme from our first cohort to the fourth cohort where even just moving data from data centers into the cloud is a huge step for some of these organizations. They didn't imagine that that could even be possible, creating data lakes so that they have access to this really precious data, and they can actually not only in current time help their communities they're serving, but they're predicting what's going to happen, and then layering AI into those very extraordinary basic solutions like a migration or like a data lake is really actually adding so much power and scale for these organizations, and it's happening quickly. We're seeing them build really quickly, right? ThriveLink from one year ago has just been able to excel on their cloud journey, and it's strengthening their business, which is a huge part of the ecosystem.

Gemma Allen

>> Kwamane, talk about the product side of this. You said you were a nurse.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I know you also had a technology background, but it's impressive to take the world of a clinician and turn into a technically enabled solution in that space of time. What was that build like? Explain, break that down for us.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. It was an incredible experience that we built alongside hospital systems where the actual doctors and nurses helped us build it, and technology partners like AWS, because it's an important piece where when we work in human services, healthcare and places where people are vulnerable, you need the human aspect and the technology. We understood two things at once. Hospital systems, small community clinics who really are serving the families that need it most, they struggle to be able to hire enough staff. So we built one end where we were building in such a way that we can help extend your staff, but one of the things that we had to be able to do was offer 24-hour actual humans in the loop. But the only way to do that is to have an incredible tech stack so that we could do it scalably so that the majority of the families that engage with ThriveLink can do it themselves. It was a really important experience where we knew how to do it from a human perspective, so phase one was getting permission from families to record calls so that we can understand what kind of questions we needed to ask and train the AI agents. A really cool thing about the timing was last year, beginning of last year when we were in the accelerator, it's an interesting thing where AI, we were still figuring out how to use it, how to fit it into use cases, how to make sure we do it safely and all these things. We got to work in this program and configure our system so that it's scalable and engaging people in the same way that we do today. By doing that, we grew from serving families in four states to 18 states today-

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Kwamane Liddell

>> ... with more coming along in the near future. It's really a powerful opportunity to bring this level of technological infrastructure and insights and combine it with the things we know how to do so well and engage your families in the community.

Gemma Allen

>> It's interesting we end up in these debates all the time about tokenomics and tech right now, right? We talked to billion-dollar founders who say, "We couldn't access GPUs. We didn't have access," because we know there's a shortage and we know how the tech cycle goes. When we think about the world of social impact and small business and nonprofits, it's so important that there is this tech unlock, right? And that those threads don't ever get left behind. When you think about that, Kat, from the perspective of AWS, how do you think about scaling something like this and ensuring that, again, there is that tech unlock to bring the kindness and empathy of a clinician with a tech-minded solution to life in the field?

Kat Esser

>> Our actual cohorts are going to help us scale it, right? We have a limited amount of resources at AWS that are dedicated to this, but the power is the ecosystem that's being built by the ThriveLinks, and they're actually working with their peers, and what's going to scale it is that they're all now working on AWS and they're building on AWS and they're going to be able to interoperably work with each other and share capabilities, solve each other's problems rather than having to build something new. And we're seeing that already.

Gemma Allen

>> So you're essentially building a social impact brain muscle to the work of the accelerator. Talk a little bit about how you, Kwamane, market this. We know that a lot of folks in these situations don't have access to information, right? They don't have the resources and even the communities that some of us are lucky enough to have. How do you ensure that they know this exists?

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. It's really important to think about two audiences that we partner with. One thing where AWS has been really important for us is making sure we can build out the security infrastructure that we need so that we can properly engage with large hospital systems, health insurance companies and governments. Phase one was building something that had a high-quality product that's secure so that we can work with doctors. By doing that, when a patient walks into some hospital systems, if they screen positive for food, housing, transportation, they get an automatic message from that doctor that goes directly to the patient. It understands the context. You were in the emergency department or you were inpatient or you were at this clinic, you saw this doctor. It has all of those pieces that are engaged in your real experience and it contacts you at the right time. You just left the hospital, you need food right now. You get this message, and now our technology can help you go that next mile. It's really been transformative and I'm excited from building it even to just being a nurse that supports these families to see that this exists.

Gemma Allen

>> It's so clever in that sense because it brings wholeness and wellbeing into the prescription, right? You leave a hospital, you have prescription, you get that filled. There's so many other elements to the problem, so that's so smart. Folks, I love the story. What's ahead? Close us out. Talk about what does the next 12 months look like for you, Kat, because I don't think any of us can think beyond that right now. And for you, too, Kwamane, what's ahead? Where do you guys build from here? I'll start with you, Kat.

Kat Esser

>> I'm really excited. I'll be provocative here for a minute and say that in the next 12 months, the world is going to change dramatically where AI is becoming mainstreamed and it's going to allow and free up organizations, startups like ThriveLink, to actually do the work that they want to do and be able to track it with the right data and be able to predict the future of what these communities need rather than just living in the current state. And the future for the accelerator specifically is I believe that there are going to be more of the cohorts working together and actually creating more social impact together and creating basically a new space out there in the world that is using technology for good.

Gemma Allen

>> Love that. And you, Kwamane, what does the next 12 months look like for you and your team?

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. Really big things are happening. There are lots of changes to how you access Medicaid, how do you access SNAP, which are food benefits, and the infrastructure and workforce that's necessary to help more families understand how to navigate it are already pulled in. And we've created something where over the next 12 months, we're going to release medicaidsignup.com and organizations, Medicaid plans, governments and people will be able to navigate it to that ecosystem, work with AI agents that can help them overcome those barriers in real time and the data track directly back to the health plans that need to support them. We're really excited and it really builds on the ecosystem a space that hasn't been occupied that is really needed as opposed to disrupting it.

Gemma Allen

>> I love it. Well, folks, it's a true example of tech for good, right? A measurable social impact. Kwamane, I congratulate you, and Kat, wonderful to have you both on the show.

Kat Esser

>> Thank you.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Thank you so much.

Kat Esser

>> Appreciate it.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here with theCUBE, live on the ground at AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. 2026. We've got some great guests coming up. Next we have OpenAI and Accenture. What a combo. Don't go anywhere.

Kwamane Liddell, ThriveLink & Kat Esser, Impact Accelerators

search

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here live on the ground in Washington, D.C. for AWS Summit 2026. We are bringing you all the live action, talking to some of the best minds and brain trusts building this next paradigm of AWS. One thing that we need to remember is that some of AI's biggest breakthroughs won't necessarily happen in boardrooms. They will happen in communities. And for conversation on exactly that, joining me now is Kwamane Liddell from ThriveLink and Kat Esser from AWS Social Impact. Welcome, guys.

Kat Esser

>> Thank you.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Thank you.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm going to be honest, when I saw this brief, I was like, "I love this," because I love using technology for social good, right? What is there not to love about that? I want to hear about the accelerator and I want to hear about ThriveLink, so first, maybe Kat, talk to me about what you built at AWS Social Impact and what you saw in ThriveLink.

Kat Esser

>> It's actually what our customers built for us and showed us that there was a need that we could fill with our technology that we hadn't really thought of, which is, how might we take social impact customers, use our technology lever of cloud and AI and actually train them to use that to build solutions, help strengthen their businesses, and also make impact at scale for the communities that they serve? We started an accelerator program in 2025 which was inviting different organizations like ThriveLink to come and really kind of mature on their cloud journey and be able to be in a cohort with their peers from all over the world that are doing really hard work solving problems in health, education and climate.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Kwamane, tell me your origin story, the background to ThriveLink.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. Background, I'm an emergency department nurse-

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Kwamane Liddell

>> ... and I jokingly say that I was a travel nurse before it became cool. In experiencing that, I got to see all these different communities and the resource differences that people would experience. While working in the Alameda Health System, which is the health system in Oakland, the county health system for Oakland, there were so many families that didn't need more healthcare, they needed food, housing, transportation, and we knew that they existed in the community. We started out as a nonprofit. I drug my brother in to help me where we would just voluntarily help people sign up and do paperwork. As that began to scale and we thought about how do we support more people, it was a perfect timing where we thought about, how do we build a phone system where the families that we support who, they didn't have internet, it was hard for them to get on the bus and get places all the time, but it started out as just a recorded phone line where people would answer questions for SNAP, which is food benefits, and we would write down that information. It's been a transformative experience where now we build AI agents that get to talk to people about all kinds of things and help them access food, housing, healthcare and more.

Gemma Allen

>> There's so much to unpack there in terms of how technology is so instrumental really in shaping lives, right? But accessing that technology, because there's a whole "You don't know what you don't know" element to life and society, so what you built, I love it. It's a great story. Talk me through some examples of some lives or some use cases of this technology, if there's any story you could bring to life for us.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah, yeah. I'll tell two quick ones. One of them was a hospital system. The way that the world works right now is people go to the emergency departments when they're sick. Then oftentimes they're not sick enough to stay in the hospital and they need additional support when they leave, and hospitals, it's just really hard for them to have the capacity to do that. So we worked with a hospital system in North Carolina where they saw this problem. Families come into their hospitals that need food. Our AI agents now deliver food to everyone who says they're food-insecure. They get a week of groceries. What we learned from that was that there's a family and now so many families that, they have full-time jobs, they work all the time, but because they were sick, they fell behind on some of their bills and utilities and things like that. So we were able to help a family. The use case that told us to start helping with energy assistance, we were able to help a mom who, she was sick herself, but she missed work and her utilities were going to be turned off. Our system talked to her in the middle of the night and talked to the government and turned her lights on for her and her children. This was something that we now see that impacts families all over the country who are living paycheck to paycheck, but they're just having a harder time because they got sick or they had to miss work for some other reason.

Gemma Allen

>> All we ever are is the output of time and circumstance, right?

Kwamane Liddell

>> Mm-hmm.

Gemma Allen

>> Kat, let's talk about the technologies that we're building, right? What are you seeing here across the gamut of this accelerator? Are we talking about voice assistance, ranking data for the purpose of creating forms? Give me some examples of what such technology we're building in the accelerator. Are you seeing folks build on the AWS stack that's feeding into that?

Kat Esser

>> I would call it extraordinary basics. There's this theme from our first cohort to the fourth cohort where even just moving data from data centers into the cloud is a huge step for some of these organizations. They didn't imagine that that could even be possible, creating data lakes so that they have access to this really precious data, and they can actually not only in current time help their communities they're serving, but they're predicting what's going to happen, and then layering AI into those very extraordinary basic solutions like a migration or like a data lake is really actually adding so much power and scale for these organizations, and it's happening quickly. We're seeing them build really quickly, right? ThriveLink from one year ago has just been able to excel on their cloud journey, and it's strengthening their business, which is a huge part of the ecosystem.

Gemma Allen

>> Kwamane, talk about the product side of this. You said you were a nurse.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I know you also had a technology background, but it's impressive to take the world of a clinician and turn into a technically enabled solution in that space of time. What was that build like? Explain, break that down for us.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. It was an incredible experience that we built alongside hospital systems where the actual doctors and nurses helped us build it, and technology partners like AWS, because it's an important piece where when we work in human services, healthcare and places where people are vulnerable, you need the human aspect and the technology. We understood two things at once. Hospital systems, small community clinics who really are serving the families that need it most, they struggle to be able to hire enough staff. So we built one end where we were building in such a way that we can help extend your staff, but one of the things that we had to be able to do was offer 24-hour actual humans in the loop. But the only way to do that is to have an incredible tech stack so that we could do it scalably so that the majority of the families that engage with ThriveLink can do it themselves. It was a really important experience where we knew how to do it from a human perspective, so phase one was getting permission from families to record calls so that we can understand what kind of questions we needed to ask and train the AI agents. A really cool thing about the timing was last year, beginning of last year when we were in the accelerator, it's an interesting thing where AI, we were still figuring out how to use it, how to fit it into use cases, how to make sure we do it safely and all these things. We got to work in this program and configure our system so that it's scalable and engaging people in the same way that we do today. By doing that, we grew from serving families in four states to 18 states today-

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Kwamane Liddell

>> ... with more coming along in the near future. It's really a powerful opportunity to bring this level of technological infrastructure and insights and combine it with the things we know how to do so well and engage your families in the community.

Gemma Allen

>> It's interesting we end up in these debates all the time about tokenomics and tech right now, right? We talked to billion-dollar founders who say, "We couldn't access GPUs. We didn't have access," because we know there's a shortage and we know how the tech cycle goes. When we think about the world of social impact and small business and nonprofits, it's so important that there is this tech unlock, right? And that those threads don't ever get left behind. When you think about that, Kat, from the perspective of AWS, how do you think about scaling something like this and ensuring that, again, there is that tech unlock to bring the kindness and empathy of a clinician with a tech-minded solution to life in the field?

Kat Esser

>> Our actual cohorts are going to help us scale it, right? We have a limited amount of resources at AWS that are dedicated to this, but the power is the ecosystem that's being built by the ThriveLinks, and they're actually working with their peers, and what's going to scale it is that they're all now working on AWS and they're building on AWS and they're going to be able to interoperably work with each other and share capabilities, solve each other's problems rather than having to build something new. And we're seeing that already.

Gemma Allen

>> So you're essentially building a social impact brain muscle to the work of the accelerator. Talk a little bit about how you, Kwamane, market this. We know that a lot of folks in these situations don't have access to information, right? They don't have the resources and even the communities that some of us are lucky enough to have. How do you ensure that they know this exists?

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. It's really important to think about two audiences that we partner with. One thing where AWS has been really important for us is making sure we can build out the security infrastructure that we need so that we can properly engage with large hospital systems, health insurance companies and governments. Phase one was building something that had a high-quality product that's secure so that we can work with doctors. By doing that, when a patient walks into some hospital systems, if they screen positive for food, housing, transportation, they get an automatic message from that doctor that goes directly to the patient. It understands the context. You were in the emergency department or you were inpatient or you were at this clinic, you saw this doctor. It has all of those pieces that are engaged in your real experience and it contacts you at the right time. You just left the hospital, you need food right now. You get this message, and now our technology can help you go that next mile. It's really been transformative and I'm excited from building it even to just being a nurse that supports these families to see that this exists.

Gemma Allen

>> It's so clever in that sense because it brings wholeness and wellbeing into the prescription, right? You leave a hospital, you have prescription, you get that filled. There's so many other elements to the problem, so that's so smart. Folks, I love the story. What's ahead? Close us out. Talk about what does the next 12 months look like for you, Kat, because I don't think any of us can think beyond that right now. And for you, too, Kwamane, what's ahead? Where do you guys build from here? I'll start with you, Kat.

Kat Esser

>> I'm really excited. I'll be provocative here for a minute and say that in the next 12 months, the world is going to change dramatically where AI is becoming mainstreamed and it's going to allow and free up organizations, startups like ThriveLink, to actually do the work that they want to do and be able to track it with the right data and be able to predict the future of what these communities need rather than just living in the current state. And the future for the accelerator specifically is I believe that there are going to be more of the cohorts working together and actually creating more social impact together and creating basically a new space out there in the world that is using technology for good.

Gemma Allen

>> Love that. And you, Kwamane, what does the next 12 months look like for you and your team?

Kwamane Liddell

>> Yeah. Really big things are happening. There are lots of changes to how you access Medicaid, how do you access SNAP, which are food benefits, and the infrastructure and workforce that's necessary to help more families understand how to navigate it are already pulled in. And we've created something where over the next 12 months, we're going to release medicaidsignup.com and organizations, Medicaid plans, governments and people will be able to navigate it to that ecosystem, work with AI agents that can help them overcome those barriers in real time and the data track directly back to the health plans that need to support them. We're really excited and it really builds on the ecosystem a space that hasn't been occupied that is really needed as opposed to disrupting it.

Gemma Allen

>> I love it. Well, folks, it's a true example of tech for good, right? A measurable social impact. Kwamane, I congratulate you, and Kat, wonderful to have you both on the show.

Kat Esser

>> Thank you.

Kwamane Liddell

>> Thank you so much.

Kat Esser

>> Appreciate it.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here with theCUBE, live on the ground at AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. 2026. We've got some great guests coming up. Next we have OpenAI and Accenture. What a combo. Don't go anywhere.