OpenAI Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cities Deliver: AI Solutions for Public Services opportunity
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O. Leal-Neto (Global Health Institute)
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Overview
Nearly half of the world’s population lives in cities. Public services shape those residents’ everyday lives. They affect whether they can get health care, find meaningful work, live safely, and have a voice in local decisions. City governments and their partners are on the front lines of delivering these public services.
Artificial intelligence now offers new ways to meet these needs. AI can help residents access services, anticipate problems before they become crises, and respond to resident needs more effectively. Putting these capabilities to work requires solutions built around residents’ needs and developed in partnership with city governments.
In 2023, we convened over 40 civic leaders to explore how AI could improve city services. City data and AI leads across six continents, along with academic, philanthropic, and nonprofit partners, shared their use cases and discussed how to best optimize AI’s promise while mitigating the potential risks. Throughout the two- day convening, the partners expressed a clear and consistent theme: cities want to have the talent, tools, and resources to improve city services and resident wellbeing with cutting-edge technologies. In response, The Rockefeller Foundation supported partnerships for three cities to test how AI could improve livelihoods. Building on this experience, we are pleased to deepen our collaboration and expand our ambition to improve the wellbeing of city residents.
There is growing demand, and growing potential, to strengthen public services on a global scale. Philanthropy is well-positioned to support the innovation and partnerships necessary to meet this potential.
The Rockefeller Foundation and OpenAI Foundation are committing $50 million to Cities Deliver to support this work. The initiative will provide grants of $500,000 to $2 million to organizations working with city governments to improve public services through AI, especially for underserved communities. Together, these projects will aim to reach up to 100 million city residents worldwide.
Building on the lessons from this cohort and others, we aspire to grow our reach and impact through new funding partnerships, supporting the actors, sectors, and conditions necessary for safe AI solutions to benefit humanity. As societies work to shape the future of AI, we aim to spark imagination and make possible a future in which a mix of AI innovation and human ingenuity improves opportunities and wellbeing for the world’s most vulnerable communities.