AI is an accelerator, not replacement for humans: WFP's Magan Naidoo

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become critical for aid agencies such as the World Food Programme (WEP) seeking to do more with less as humanitarian crises deepen and funding shrinks.

- SANJEEB MUKHERJEE

(AI MODELS) ALLOW US TO RESPOND IN A MUCH MORE TARGETED WAY... INSTEAD OF BROAD DEPLOYMENT, WE CAN SEND (HUMAN) TEAMS EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED Magan Naidoo, Chief Data Officer, WFP

“But when it comes to addressing the core issues related to hunger, AI at best can act as an enabler and accelerator, helping get food to the right place at the right time, at lower cost and with greater precision,” said Magan Naidoo, WFP’s chief data officer, in a video interview with Business Standard.

“For example, one of our (WFP) solutions called enterprise deduplication uses photo data to match beneficiaries to remove duplicate data from the system. Now, you can imagine WFP has millions of records. We do have human teams going through them, which takes an immense amount of time. And it’s still prone to errors and cost. Now, we have AI that can crunch data at high speed, especially if you leverage a supercomputer,” said Naidoo, who was in India for the AI Impact Summit. He was part of a panel discussion participated by Rome-based UN Agencies like IFAD, FAO and WFP at the Summit.