U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) manages Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the world’s most widely used green building rating system. The community USGBC serves spans 180 countries: architects, engineers, designers, and sustainability professionals working on some of the most complex, long-running projects in the built environment.
Certifying a building under LEED isn’t a quick transaction. It’s a technical journey, and the questions it generates are rarely simple. Answering them requires routing to the right subject-matter expert, backed by reliable data and a service operation with no friction in the path. When Chief Information Officer Kapil Kher joined USGBC, that operation was visionary.
“We were already long committed to Salesforce, but our efforts were disjointed,” said Kher. “We were between legacy systems. Our knowledge was all over the place.”
That’s when Kher embarked on a three year technology overhaul.
Three knowledge platforms, two intake systems, one bottleneck
When Kapil Kher stepped into the role, he immediately recognized that USGBC’s biggest challenge was the systems they’d been asked to work with.
The organization had passionate employees, loyal members, and decades of expertise in sustainable building. But that expertise was trapped across three separate knowledge platforms and two intake systems, leaving service teams without a unified view of membership, certification history, or performance. Every interaction required jumping between systems, and leaders lacked the visibility to understand demand or improve operations.
Kher had seen this challenge before. Having worked with Salesforce in previous roles, he understood the impact a unified platform could have — not just on efficiency, but on the employee and member experience. He became an internal champion for consolidating USGBC’s fragmented service environment into a single system.
“The opportunity was all about giving our staff the internal view of membership and certification into one unified view, getting all our knowledge into one space, getting visibility on performance and demand in service to our management layer,” Kher said.
The vision was straightforward. The execution was anything but.
Bringing together years of knowledge, workflows, and customer data from multiple legacy systems required careful planning and organizational commitment. But the result transformed how the organization operated: a single Salesforce environment, one centralized knowledge base, one workflow in Agentforce Service, and one place for every team to access the information they needed. What had once been three disconnected systems became one connected service operation, giving employees the context and visibility they had never had before.
Responsiveness is the metric that matters
The results show up in the data. USGBC has closed 30,000 cases year to date and cut resolution times from 4.5 days to 3.5 — a 22% year-over-year improvement.
Kher is deliberate about how he frames that number.
“I don’t look at that as an efficiency measure,” said Kher. “I look at that as our responsiveness to our global community, which is very impactful for us.”
Efficiency is an internal metric. Responsiveness is what the community experiences. For a nonprofit serving professionals on long-term, high-stakes projects across 180 countries, those two things aren’t the same — and knowing which one to optimize for keeps the team pointed in the right direction.
Laying the groundwork for AI
USGBC’s next target is tier-one triage, which Kher identifies as one of the biggest cost drivers in their service operation. LEED is an intricate, data-heavy rating system by design, meaning incoming inquiries require deep technical context before they can be resolved. Getting them resolved means routing to the right subject-matter expert with the right context, reliably, at scale.
USGBC is now prototyping with Agentforce and AI to handle that routing and trend-spotting automatically. The reason they’re confident it will work: They built the data foundation first.
“We’ve streamlined our entire knowledge base and service operations,” said Kapil. “We’re utilizing a singular Salesforce environment and ecosystem for all our processes.”
With clean, unified data and a single workflow, AI can deliver predictable answers rather than drawing from fragmented sources. The use cases USGBC is actively prototyping all center on the same goal: being predictable, measuring impact, and surfacing performance and demand trends before they become problems.
“With the capabilities of Salesforce Service at our fingertips, along with insights from Agentforce and AI-driven experiences, we’re poised to significantly enhance our first-level support processes,” said Kher.
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