Legacy funeral and cemetery operator modernizing with AI and cloud infrastructure
Forest Lawn operates a 501–1,000-person nonprofit cemetery and funeral home chain with over a century of market position in Southern California. The tech stack reveals heavy reliance on legacy systems (NetSuite, QuickBooks, on-premises Active Directory) paired with recent cloud and AI initiatives: they're building Salesforce Agentforce agents, implementing AI governance frameworks, and deploying digital storefronts on Shopify and WordPress. Hiring velocity is accelerating across sales (8 roles) and engineering (5 roles), with active projects spanning security hardening (penetration tests, patch management), CI/CD pipeline maturation, and RAG-based AI feature development — indicating a controlled but deliberate modernization push while managing legacy compliance and privacy debt.
Forest Lawn is a nonprofit funeral home and cemetery operator headquartered in Glendale, CA. The company serves families in Southern California with cemetery property, funeral services, cremation, and community events, operating through a mixed technology infrastructure of traditional on-premises business systems (NetSuite ERP, QuickBooks accounting) and emerging cloud platforms (Azure, Microsoft 365, Salesforce). Current projects include cemetery civil engineering work, digital storefronts on e-commerce platforms, and Salesforce-based AI agent development. The organization is actively hiring across sales, engineering, operations, and support functions, with particular focus on building internal technical capability and governance frameworks for AI adoption.
Salesforce (core CRM) with Salesforce Agentforce for AI agents, Salesforce Experience Cloud for digital customer portals, and NetSuite for enterprise resource planning across finance and operations.
Forest Lawn is actively building an AI roadmap and governance framework, with active development of Salesforce Agentforce agents, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) implementation, and structured work to reduce AI hallucination risks in customer-facing use cases.
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