AI for Social Good: A Special Interview with Dataminr’s Jessie End

Dataminr is a leading AI-powered real-time event detection company that helps organizations act on critical, fast-emerging information. Known for its work in cybersecurity and corporate security, the company also applies its cutting-edge AI technology to humanitarian crises, disaster response, and other social good initiatives. Through its nonprofit product offerings and AI for Good program, Dataminr supports NGOs with life-saving insights and early warning capabilities.

In an exclusive interview, Jessie End, Vice President of Social Good at Dataminr, acknowledged that this is a new space for both technologists and nonprofit organizations. However, she emphasized that AI has the potential to drive real social impact—not just in responding to crises but in helping to prevent them.

Dataminr’s Technology in Action

At its core, Dataminr’s AI-powered event detection platform provides real-time intelligence to help organizations take swift action. While widely used in corporate security and cyber risk mitigation, Jessie’s team focuses on applying this technology to support humanitarian response and social good initiatives. She explained that with an AI team of several dozen engineers, research and data scientists, the question became how to leverage this expertise for social impact.

Dataminr’s Social Good team takes a two-pronged approach:

• First Alert for Nonprofits – A real-time AI detection platform that helps nonprofits and crisis responders act quickly in emergencies.

• AI for Good program – Pairs AI experts with NGOs to develop custom AI-driven solutions tailored to their missions.

One of the most compelling examples of AI’s impact came from Save the Children and Pact, two organizations that successfully evacuated staff members from Sudan thanks to Dataminr’s early warnings. Another example is their collaboration with Mnemonic to improve access to human rights evidence, helping prosecutors and legal experts analyze massive datasets of images, videos, and text. 

Beyond Response: AI for Early Warning Systems

While crisis response is crucial, Jessie and her team are increasingly focused on early intervention and crisis prevention. She highlighted that while there will always be a need for crisis response, the more humanitarian organizations can predict and mitigate crises before they escalate, the better.

Examples of this work include:

• Working with the UN Human Rights Office, where Dataminr’s AI helps automate detection of threats to human rights, including attacks on human rights defenders and violent repression of peaceful demonstrations.

• Developing crisis monitoring tools with humanitarian organizations to detect risks like forced migration, food insecurity, and climate-related disasters.

Empowering Local Communities with AI

Dataminr is committed to ensuring that local responders—often the first on the ground—have access to critical AI tools. Jessie pointed out that local humanitarian workers take on the most risk, noting that in 2023, 96% of aid workers killed were local staff, and about half worked for local organizations rather than major INGOs (source).

To address this, Dataminr is launching a pro bono licensing model in February 2025, allowing qualifying nonprofits to access its AI platform for free. This initiative aims to level the playing field, ensuring smaller NGOs have the same advanced safety and security tools as larger organizations.

In addition, Dataminr collaborates with organizations like Ushahidi that crowdsource real-time reports, enabling communities to share updates on local disasters, conflict, and security threats.

Choosing the Right AI Projects: A Balancing Act

With AI advancing rapidly, there’s pressure from donors and stakeholders to pursue ambitious, cutting-edge projects. However, Jessie and her team take a pragmatic approach, carefully selecting only two to three AI for Good projects per year from the more than 70 applications they receive through their RFP. She explained that while there are many exciting applications, they must be selective, ensuring that projects are technically feasible, have measurable impact, and align with Dataminr’s core strengths, including cutting-edge LLMs, Computer Vision and Multimodal technologies.

One unique aspect of Dataminr’s approach is its new matchmaking initiative, which connects promising NGO project submissions with academic researchers and AI professionals who have the bandwidth to take them on. Jessie described how they struggled to select just two to three projects from a pool of strong submissions, so they now facilitate partnerships that allow projects to move forward with support from the AI research community.

Looking Ahead: AI’s Role in Predicting Crises

As Dataminr looks to 2025 and beyond, its focus is on scaling impact and deepening collaborations. One major priority is expanding its early warning system partnerships, especially as global crises become more complex and interconnected. Jessie explained that the term polycrisis—when multiple crises interact and amplify each other, such as climate disasters, conflict and migration—illustrates why AI is so crucial in helping organizations see these patterns earlier and prepare accordingly.

Dataminr is looking to integrate with geospatial analytics and predictive modeling to build stronger, multi-layered early warning systems that help organizations act faster and smarter. Jessie shared her vision for the future, stating that she wants Dataminr’s AI to be ubiquitous among nonprofits, as there is no reason an organization doing critical, life-saving work should lack access to this technology.

Conclusion: AI as a Force for Good

Dataminr’s AI for Good initiatives demonstrate that AI can be more than just a business tool—it can be a life-saving force. From early crisis detection to real-time response and AI-powered human rights investigations, Dataminr is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Jessie summed it up by acknowledging that the AI for Good space is still new and they continue to learn from and iterate with the organizations they serve", but the potential for AI in humanitarian efforts is enormous.

This article is based on an exclusive interview with Jessie End, Vice President of Social Good at Dataminr. Stay tuned for updates as Dataminr’s 2024–2025 initiatives continue to evolve.

Continued Reading

• Early Warnings for All

• Ushahidi empowers people through citizen-generated data

• World Humanitarian Day 2024

• Ushahidi Creates New AI Models With Dataminr to Improve Data Management

• Dataminr Announces 2024 AI for Good Partners

• The Sudan Crisis: How Dataminr Helped NGOs Safely Evacuate Humanitarian Workers