Google and World Bank Partner on AI-Powered Services in Emerging Markets

Google and the World Bank partnered to work with governments to build artificial intelligence-powered public digital infrastructure in emerging markets.

The collaboration will deploy Open Network Stacks that help citizens access services, and it will bring together Google Cloud’s AI technology and the World Bank’s development expertise, Google said in a Tuesday (Oct. 14) press release.

The initiative will focus on creating interoperable networks for agriculture, healthcare, skilling and other critical sectors, according to the release. It will enable citizens to use simple devices to interact with AI-powered services in more than 40 languages.

“The collaboration builds on a successful pro bono pilot in Uttar Pradesh in India that helped thousands of smallholder farmers increase profitability,” Google said in the release.

In another, separate deployment of AI, Google reported in a Thursday (Oct. 9) blog post that the World Bank was developing AI agents to extract information from research literature on the impact of development interventions, “with the ultimate goal to empower decision-makers to allocate $220 billion in annual aid and trillions in annual impact investing more effectively.”

In a March blog post, Google’s philanthropic initiative, Google.org, said it had contributed more than $200 million to “AI for social good initiatives” over the previous five years.

Google.org added that in September 2024, it introduced a new funding approach called AI Collaboratives that brings together public, private and nonprofit organizations, as well as researchers, to create AI-powered solutions around the world.

In March, it launched AI Collaboratives for Wildfires and Food Security, saying it had found that these are areas in which AI can be especially helpful.

The AI Collaborative: Wildfires aims to help people and communities use AI to better manage fires by identifying and tracking wildfires in near real time, quantifying wildfire risk, and shifting more acreage to beneficial fire, according to the post.

The AI Collaborative: Food Security plans to use AI technology, collaborative research, data-sharing and coordinated action to strengthen the resilience of global food systems and improve food security for vulnerable populations, per the post.

“By addressing urgent challenges like wildfires and food insecurity, our hope is that these Collaboratives create a foundation for AI to make meaningful societal contributions for years to come,” Google.ai said in the post.

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