United Nations agencies are ramping up efforts to use artificial intelligence for day-to-day efficiency — and, increasingly, to support work in the field. It’s not only a race not to keep pace with advancements in AI, in many cases, but a bid to keep up with staff requests for new solutions amid tightening budgets and limited resources.
In the last few years, dedicated AI teams have cropped up across many agencies, while existing IT and digital units pivoted to focus on the technology as guidance and strategies emerged at varying paces. Meanwhile, resources are being put in place to support enterprising staff and, ideally, identify innovative and replicable solutions. At one agency, staff are codesigning a translation tool with refugees in a low-resource minority language, while another team is building a virtual assistant to support migrant entrepreneurs in Paraguay. Elsewhere, communications teams are using AI to create avatars that deliver leadership speeches in multiple languages.
The U.N. is being pulled in two different directions, explained Claire Melamed, vice president for AI and digital cooperation strategy at the UN Foundation. While she said a cautious approach toward spending money is needed, she noted “there’s also the pressures of individual staff who can see opportunities and who are just raving to put them into practice and an institution that is confronting serious challenges of resourcing, rising expectations, falling budgets, and who think, often quite rightly, that technology can help them.”