UN turns to Google to make its global data AI-ready
What's the story
The United Nations (UN) has announced a partnership with tech giant Google to make its extensive global statistics more accessible and usable for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The initiative, called the UN System Data Commons, replaces the current UNData portal. The new system is built on Google's open-source Data Commons platform and lets users search for statistics from different UN agencies using natural-language queries.
Platform features
New platform connects directly to AI systems
The new platform also supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that lets AI systems directly connect with external data sources.
This is a major improvement over the traditional database interface of the existing UNData portal, where users had to browse and search for statistics manually.
The goal is to make global statistics more accessible and usable for AI systems, thereby improving their accuracy in providing authoritative data.
AI challenges
Many AI systems struggle with data access
A recent UNICEF benchmark study found that many AI systems still struggle to provide reliable access to authoritative data.
The study tested six large language models on over 133,000 responses to questions about global development indicators and found an average accuracy score of just 21.2%.
Joao Pedro Azevedo, UNICEF's chief statistician, said this highlights the need for improved data accessibility and usability in AI systems.
Data hosting
UN's commitment to data commons
The UN has announced that 26 of its entities have committed to the Data Commons, with data from nearly 20 available at launch.
The organization plans to host 80% of the UN system's statistical datasets on this platform by 2027.
Shantanu Mukherjee, acting director of the UN Statistics Division, said this initiative is a major step toward making their data AI-ready and more accessible across different agencies in the UN system.
Support details
Google.org's support for the initiative
Google.org has provided $2 million in capacity-building funding and technical support to build the core infrastructure of the platform.
Prem Ramaswami, head of Google's Data Commons team, said that the system is hosted on a UN-governed instance and is meant to be maintained, operated, and scaled independently by the UN in the future.
This shows Google's commitment to supporting this important initiative.
Data tracking
Tracking sources of statistics
The UN's platform also tracks the source of each statistic, allowing users to trace data retrieved by an AI system back to the original UN source.
This is crucial as more people rely on AI tools for information.
Google demonstrated how an AI system connected to the UN data via MCP could compile multiple indicators and use them for creating dashboards, charts, and written analysis without manual effort from users.