In many places, the conversation about AI has already moved past potential, it's being used to solve real problems. Raj Kumar captures this well. We're seeing it at Acumen too, with entrepreneurs across our community deploying AI-powered tools to tackle poverty in practical, grounded ways.
The development sector has a reflex: study, pilot, evaluate, scale - slowly. AI is not respecting that sequence. Some of the most consequential innovations I'm seeing right now are in Lagos and Jakarta - and by entrepreneurs solving problems that Silicon Valley never has. Here's what's different this time. Past technology waves gave the development sector reasons to wait: cost, connectivity, complexity. AI has totally dismantled those roadblocks. Open-source tools. Feature phones. Large language models that cost almost nothing to run. Real capability is now in the hands of social entrepreneurs across emerging markets (...and at a fraction of what it cost even 5 years ago). I saw the evidence at a recent Tencent / Devex roundtable. I went in expecting some debate about potential. All examples on the table were already operational - some familiar, others I hadn't tracked. Dowson Tong, who runs Tencent’s AI and cloud business, kicked us off with a sense of the potential scale: he’s already scaling AI to over a billion users. That same drive is showing up across the development and humanitarian sector. Take UNHCR's Digital Gateway. It already lets refugees book health appointments and enroll kids in school on their own. With global displacement at a record 123 million people, deputy high commissioner Kelly T. Clements called it "a game changer" for reaching refugees "faster and better in more locations." The private sector appetite for this is outpacing even its own assumptions. Prosus (the global tech investment companies behind major emerging market platforms) ran their Tech FoundHER Africa Challenge and were flooded with 1,110+ applications from women entrepreneurs already using AI to tackle local problems, from farming to mental health. Prajna Khanna, who directs sustainability strategy across the company, said the response "was really blowing our assumptions away about the penetration of AI, and the use of AI, and adoption of AI in Africa." Jacqueline Novogratz, who has spent 2 decades reshaping how the sector thinks about entrepreneurship and poverty through Acumen, is seeing the same thing. A recent piece of theirs said it well: "entrepreneurs in Africa are building AI solutions unlike anyone else." Look, I'm personally optimistic AI can make some real dents in global inequities. And that room reinforced it. But the honest read is that the sector's oldest problem is still the binding constraint: coordination at scale. Clements put it bluntly: "It can't just be about the UN. It can't be about the humanitarian sector. It takes the private sector. It takes governments. It takes civil society. It takes academia." The entrepreneurs are ready. The tech’s ready. The question is whether we are. Would love to hear from people working on this: where are you seeing AI actually scale in ways that are improving lives today? And what's making it work?