AI as a Catalyst: Drive Impactful Innovation for Social Startups

Introduction

I'm Bruna and I'm going to be talking today about AI and social startups. But first, I wanted to introduce myself.

I'm Peruvian, I'm from Peru, from South America, but I've been living here in Madrid for the last two years. I'm also currently working at Globant, a tech consultancy company, where I'm in the business and strategy studio helping clients on their AI and digital transformation.

I'm also a volunteer of Women in AI Spain, a nonprofit organization. And our aim is to reduce the gender gap in the AI industry.

We are more than 8,000 women and men also all over the world. And I am part of the Spanish chapter.

Personal Motivation

OK, why am I talking about this? Why am I talking about AI and social impact? Mainly because I care.

15% of the global population has disabilities. It's one billion people. And one of them is my brother.

This is Gianluca. Some years ago, I decided to start an initiative for mothers with kids with disabilities. Our impact strategy was to impact the mother so the mother can impact her child.

And it started as a community, but very fastly we launched our first digital product, which was an edtech company. And our purpose was to give mothers tools to help her with the upbringing of her child with autism and disabilities.

So this is one social cause that I care about, disabilities. I'm part of that ecosystem because of my brother.

But of course, there are thousands of other causes that are waiting for someone to address them. These are global challenges. I don't want to go into much detail on these figures because it's not the purpose of this talk.

Let's see the numbers of extreme poverty. Almost 10% of the global population still lives with less than $2 per day.

13% of the world's population, adults, doesn't know how to write or read, limiting their lives and their chances to improve their life quality.

And also it's about maternal mortality. Almost 1,000 women die every day because of causes related to their pregnancy.

But these are just some causes.

some social causes that for sure there is a need for change and as it is a need for change there is also a market opportunity and here I want to very fast talk about how big is the social enterprise industry So there are more than 10 million social enterprises. It's 3% of the total enterprises are social. This generates $2 trillion annual revenue.

How big is this? How small is this?

We were talking about marketing and advertising. This industry is two times larger than the advertising industry. And it's even bigger than the apparel industry.

And I see a lot of women here today. This is also an opportunity for women. 50% of the social enterprises are led by women. Very different when you see the numbers in the conventional companies, where it's only 20%.

I've been talking a lot about social enterprises.

What is a social enterprise? Very briefly, it's a business that puts people and the planet first.

And it has a purpose. Its purpose is mainly give a solution to a global challenge.

And of course, it needs to generate revenue. It needs to have a revenue model that is sustainable.

There are other criteria to be described as a social enterprise, of course. Okay, but this was just a short introduction.

Why am I talking about this? How important I think this is.

And now I want to talk about some case studies and how AI can help social enterprises boost their impact. Something important to say is that I've chosen examples where AI helps driving the core solution, the value proposition. Of course, you can use AI for marketing, better decision making, for improving your daily life, but the examples I'm going to give you are more related to how AI can enable the value proposition of the social startup.

So this is the first example, is AI Poly. It's an app that helps people with visual impairment to describe what is their surroundings.

1So here, imagine someone has their cell phone and will say, this is an auditorium with more than 50 people. They are looking at you.

It will describe the surroundings. And this solution uses vision or revision intelligence.

And it has the power to identify more than 1,000 common objects, also more than 2,000 species of animals and plants. you can translate it to more than 20 different languages.

It recognizes color, so this totally gives a different way of navigating the real world to a person that has a visual impairment.

This is the second example I wanted to give you. I'm very surprised about this startup. Its name is Rainforest Connection.

And what they have done is that they have identified the sounds of the rainforest so they can understand when there is illegal activity, like logging or poaching. So because they understand how the nature should sound, and as soon as they hear something that it's It's an anomaly in this trend. It recognizes and alerts the authorities.

Also, they have another use of this historical data. They are able to predict when usually this illegal activity happens. So imagine, hey, in the last five years, Illegal activity has come between January and March by this type of people, this type of organizations. So it's a way of also predicting and anticipating illegal activity.

And the last thing, I think it's amazing, which is as they know the historical information and the data, they can also predict and understand the species' behavior. So if some animals are moving or walking or doing any sound that is unusual, they are also able to alert this to the people that work on the conservation and the preservation of the rainforest and the species so they can take a look on these animals.

And the last one is Kipu. This is a very different example. This is related to financial inclusion.

And what they are doing is that they have created an algorithm with more than 80,000 data points of financial and non-financial information. And with this information, they are creating a credit trustworthiness scoring. So they can give loans to people that they are usually not attractive for traditional banking.

So here we have three different examples on how the AI is an enabler of the value proposition. In the first one is how using AI to empower visually impairment population with cutting edge technology.

The second one related to the rainforest, how we can use AI and acoustics to detect illegal activity and prevent and increase the preservation of the rainforest.

And the last one is how we are bringing financial inclusion to people that are usually not attractive for the traditional banking by creating another creditworthiness and seeing another, actually in their webpage they say, we are able to see another potential in these entrepreneurs because we are using the data in a different way.

Key Takeaways

And just to finish, these are some capabilities of the AI that I would like to highlight. Of course there should be people here that could be able to highlight even more capabilities, but these are some that really grabbed my attention.

In the first one, that was the app for visually impaired people. I think that's something that we could highlight as a capability of AI is the vision artificial intelligence and be able to recognize objects in real time. And also this capability of the AI from image to speech because this app and this solution can describe as a narrative in an audio to the visually impaired person what is happening in their environment.

On the second example, how the use of AI power acoustic analytics and how AI is capable of transforming any point of data, in this case audio, into analytics and detect any illegal activity through sound. 1And also the predictive analytics that I told you that they are capable of predicting when is the season that usually attracts more illegal activities or the behavior also of the animals.

And in the last example about AI-driven data analytics, how AI is capable of transforming huge amounts of data. We were talking about an algorithm of more than 80,000 points of data and how the AI has the capacity to transfer that. into a credit scoring.

So this is mainly what I wanted to tell you about. These are the main takeaways.

The first one is there is a need for social startups. There are different global challenges that need to be addressed. There is also market opportunity. We've seen how big this market is.

Also, AI can help you accelerate the impact of your idea of your startup, especially if it's part of the core value proposition. And the last topic, we haven't had the time to talk about that in that much. We didn't have the time, but if you want to help someone, let's help her or him with responsibility, with compliance, and following ethical practices.

Conclusion

So let's connect if you want. This is my QR code for my LinkedIn. I'm very happy to answer any question.