I believe we can end extreme poverty within our lifetime.

Growing up in India, my family counted every rupee. My mother had to sell her jewelry to send us to school. Our greatest wealth was our community of family and friends, our grit, and our determination to build a better tomorrow. For those in poverty, relationships and commitment are the currency that carries you through even the most uncertain times. My own experiences have taught me that true leadership is forged in crisis. 

My own personal journey — in life and in business — shows me that there is a way forward to achieving a world where all people go to bed with food in their belly and a roof over their head. It’s a bold goal, especially as we see our world growing increasingly unstable, but I believe we can end extreme poverty within our lifetime. 

That belief has never been truer in my eyes, especially as we begin this new technological revolution. Technology is always the disruptor. I saw it firsthand when introducing ATMs and other banking innovations in India for Citibank. My organization, Opportunity International, has spent the last 50 years seeking innovations to better serve the poorest in the world. 

Already we have replaced millions in lost resources, preserving vital support, training, and financial services for small businesses across Africa. Hundreds of small and micro-business owners who would have otherwise faced collapse are continuing to receive the tools they need to build their businesses and keep their children in school, ensuring the social and economic fabric of their communities remains intact. 

In Silicon Valley the term “human-centered design” is how engineers and product developers frame their ability to meet the needs of their clients. Microsoft, Apple, and others make painstaking efforts to get into the heads of their audiences, seeking to build products that can become truly impactful in the lives of the consumer. In the humanitarian world, it can be considered many things: strengths-based programming, informed care, cocreated interventions. The name matters not, but the essential lesson must not be ignored: Innovations must be rooted in understanding the people we serve. 

Recently we’ve embraced generative AI to drive tangible, scalable improvements for underserved communities around the globe. We believe that AI can be even more transformative for the people we serve than anywhere else — but when trying to help those at the base of the economic pyramid, technology for technology’s sake can cause more problems than solutions. 

Here are three practical lessons I’ve learned about integrating AI successfully within an organization. 

1. Solve Hidden Barriers First

When serving people in extreme poverty, economic limitations are only the surface issue. The deeper you go, the more you encounter nonobvious barriers that have little to do with money. Social and economic structures, communal norms, and even geographies produce challenges at the heart of what keep our clients from achieving success. Successfully serving these populations means explicitly recognizing and addressing those hidden, structural obstacles first. 

Thirty-five years ago Opportunity International pivoted from offering individual loans to a model of group lending focused on under-supported populations. This wasn’t just a financial innovation; it was a recognition of social dynamics and cultural barriers that kept people from participating in formal financial systems. Likewise today our AI tools are designed with these realities in mind. Local languages, offline environments, and cultural context all play a critical role. When you overcome the hidden barriers, the rest will flow together. 

2. Your Client Is the True Expert

Our most successful innovations are born not in boardrooms but in the communities we serve. Our generative AI chatbot for farmers in Malawi started with conversations in a rural village outside of the nation’s capital. A farmer named Anna told us how difficult it can be to find support and training to navigate ongoing weather crises. Her insights, day-to-day challenges, and aspirations helped inspire the very development of our chatbot. The result? An AI solution that is not only helpful but embraced. 

The tool’s success led us to launch an internal innovation accelerator we call the Collaboration Laboratory to scale this approach. Every year we bring together all 200+ of our staff, most of whom are in the field every day, to develop ideas for new interventions that are informed by their experience with our clients. In partnership with the people we serve, we select the best ideas, develop and test prototypes, refine them, and build fully functioning tools alongside our users. It’s not about scaling tech. It’s about scaling trust. 

3. Prioritize Leverage, Not Complexity

AI’s power lies in leverage and scale — the ability to serve more people better at lower cost. For those of us working in the impact sector’s constrained environments, this is a game changer, but it only works if you resist the temptation to over-engineer. Our best AI tools are the simplest. They address real client problems in intuitive, accessible ways. 

When we designed our AI application to help teachers develop lesson plans, our focus wasn’t on how advanced the tech could be — it was on how easy it could be to use. If a farmer in a remote village can access key crop advice without needing a smartphone or internet connection, we’ve succeeded. That’s the kind of leverage that leads to scale. 

As CEOs our role is to foster innovation that truly matters. AI presents an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally transform lives. Our designers and engineers spend much of their time thinking about how to achieve success, but it is your client who will show you why they need a product in the first place. In the end the most important piece to the AI puzzle isn’t the technology. It’s the people.