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For six-year-old Ari in Jamaica, artificial intelligence has opened a door many children take for granted: reading a book in his own language.
Thousands of kilometres away, AI is helping screen gold miners in Ethiopia for tuberculosis more quickly, while communities around the world are benefiting from faster detection of methane leaks that contribute to global warming.
Across its agencies, the United Nations is increasingly using AI to address challenges in education, health and climate change, while also working to shape global rules to ensure the technology advances human rights, peace and security.
For Ari, learning difficulties had made studying a challenge. AI technology is now being used to convert existing textbooks into interactive formats tailored to his needs.
“The real impact is what this means for children,” Pia Rebello Britto, UNICEF’s Global Director of Education and Adolescent Development, told UN News. “There are countless more examples like Ari’s, showing what becomes possible when digital learning is designed to reach every child.”
UNICEF has placed the communities it serves at the centre of its approach to AI and digital technology.
The agency worked with advocacy groups to develop its Accessible Digital Textbooks for All initiative, aimed at overcoming a persistent barrier in education: inaccessible learning materials for the nearly 240 million children worldwide living with disabilities.
The programme predates the recent surge in AI but has increasingly incorporated AI-assisted technology. It now operates in 17 countries and reaches nearly two million children, with UNICEF aiming to expand it to 50 countries by 2030. Six countries joined the initiative this year.
AI is also helping the UN tackle one of the most urgent drivers of climate change: methane emissions.
“Everybody, every person, citizen, anywhere in the world who is concerned about climate change must have an interest in slowing down global warming, and fixing methane leaks is the emergency brake,” said Martin Krause, director of the Climate Change Division at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
UNEP launched the Methane Alert and Response System in 2024, using AI to analyse data from 30 satellites and identify large methane plumes.
The system has helped prevent emissions equivalent to those produced by 24 million gas-powered cars, according to UNEP. AI can detect methane leaks 12 to 15 times faster and more accurately than humans, Krause said.
Over the past two years, the system has generated around 7,500 alerts, prompting 42 mitigation actions.
Companies have often acted quickly on the alerts because repairing methane leaks can also prevent the loss of valuable products, creating an economic incentive alongside the environmental benefits.
Methane has more than 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Reducing methane emissions can also help limit the formation of harmful ground-level ozone and smog, which are associated with respiratory problems.
“This is not the UN building a task force and discussing a problem and having a meeting. This is real stuff,” Krause said. “This is happening as we speak.”
AI is also helping developing countries detect tuberculosis more quickly.
With support from the World Health Organization (WHO), health programmes are using AI-assisted analysis of chest X-rays to identify signs of TB, particularly in areas where trained radiologists are scarce.
“It’s really helping people to move through the sort of diagnostic cascade onto treatment much sooner,” said Dr Vanessa Veronese, a scientist at WHO’s Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases.
Earlier diagnosis can help patients begin treatment sooner while reducing the number of infectious people in communities and, consequently, the risk of further transmission.
Veronese highlighted Ethiopia, where gold miners face increased TB risks because of prolonged exposure to dust and silica.
The technology, known as computer-aided detection, produces a TB likelihood score rapidly and can support radiologists and health workers in resource-constrained settings.
WHO recommended the use of computer-aided detection for TB screening among adults in 2021 and has since supported countries in adopting the technology. Its assistance includes implementation guidance, software calibration for national TB programmes and research into health outcomes.
“It really does help overcome these historical barriers around skilled personnel, access, cost, availability, all of these access barriers that prohibit good health,” Veronese said.
The applications extend beyond education, climate and health.
UN agencies are using AI to help detect landmines, assess damage after disasters, identify suspicious financial transactions, monitor radioactive contamination and accelerate research into nuclear fusion.
But the growing use of AI also presents significant challenges. As the technology becomes more powerful, the UN is stressing the importance of equity, human rights and ethical safeguards to ensure AI contributes to sustainable development rather than undermining peace, security and democracy.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has described AI as both “humanity’s greatest opportunity in the 21st century” and “one of its greatest risks”.
The challenge, he has stressed, is to ensure that AI remains a tool serving people rather than becoming a force that determines their futures without adequate oversight.
“We must ensure AI serves humanity, and not the other way around,” Guterres said.