Advances in AI have been moving at a breathtaking pace. While we believe that there is value to encouraging the industry to be even more open, we also feel lucky that many models are getting released with open weights to allow developers to experiment with customizing and applying them to ever more diverse use cases. This trends and outlook analysis focuses on generative AI, since that’s where a lot of the excitement has been in the last few years. However, we want to underscore that AI is a lot broader than just these models.
On the frontier technology team, we work with AI in three ways. First, we partner with country offices – largely through our Venture Fund – to test and deploy AI applications for UNICEF programming. Second, we build our own prototypes to explore technologies that we think are promising for UNICEF across multiple country settings. Finally, we support efforts to leverage AI to advance UNICEF programming more broadly – including helping the organization design its AI strategy, and working with colleagues across the organization to articulate how AI can be applied in specific sectors including WASH, learning, health, and emergency response.