Using AI in a new humanitarian landscape

As organizations like Mercy Corps navigate increasingly complex and fast-moving crises with fewer resources than ever before, agentic AI holds tremendous promise: from generating real-time, contextual reports on evolving conflicts to autonomously surfacing early warning signals from fragmented data environments. These systems can rapidly synthesize inputs from social media, satellite imagery, field reports, and open-source intelligence to augment human decision-making at unprecedented speed and scale. But the risks are real. From bias amplification to opaque decision-making and diminished human oversight, agentic AI can misstep in ways that carry real-world consequences — especially in fragile, high-stakes environments. We’ll discuss how the Mercy Corps is working to harness this technology, balancing its transformative potential with ethical safeguards that ensure AI agents serve people, not just processes.