Our approach to AI

AI for Equity

AI can accelerate progress toward a world where everyone, no matter where they are born, has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.

But moving from potential to impact isn’t inevitable. It depends on making deliberate choices: prioritizing the needs of people who are often left out and working closely with the institutions that serve them to design tools that truly deliver.

Our work in AI is focused on ensuring these benefits reach people most often left out. We work with governments and public sector partners—alongside health workers, teachers, policymakers, and farmers across low- and middle-income countries, as well as underserved communities in the United States—to build solutions grounded in real-world needs.

A farmer in a vegetable garden referencing information on a tablet

We’re going to do all we can to ensure AI is designed with equity in mind, so that its benefits reach people who are too often left behind.

Accelerating Progress With AI: Focus Areas

AI can help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges—by making limited resources go further and opening new paths to progress.

We focus where it can make the greatest difference: health, education, and agriculture—working with partners to help countries adopt and use AI effectively to support these underserved communities.

Medical workers examine a pregnant patient with an AI-powered maternity sensor in Lagos, Nigeria
Medical workers examine a pregnant patient during a demonstration of the ANNE maternity sensor, an AI-powered device for real-time monitoring of fetal vitals and contractions at the hospital’s labor ward in Lagos State, Nigeria.

Since 2000, the world has cut child deaths in half. That represents millions of lives saved each year. Within our lifetimes, we could see the end of preventable child deaths. AI can help us get there faster.

AI can expand access to care by supporting health workers, especially where specialists are scarce. Tools like AI-enabled diagnostics can help detect illness earlier and guide treatment in real time, while making health information more accessible in local languages. By reducing administrative burden and improving decision-making, AI can help health workers reach more patients with high-quality care. We are continuing to invest in research and evaluation to understand where these tools are most effective—and how to scale what works.

At the same time, AI can help speed up how new treatments are discovered—bringing life-saving innovations closer to the people who need them.

Stories From Our AI Journey

The first principles guiding our work with AI

Founder and Executive Director Ingrid Hansen shares the first principles on artificial intelligence that will be used to guide the foundation’s use of AI.

By Ingrid Hansen · Founder & Executive Director

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