Artificial intelligence usually enters our lives through headlines about big tech or global breakthroughs. But at Swissnex in Bengaluru, on an ordinary weekday morning, the conversation felt far more grounded. Employees and members of philanthropic organisations, researchers and policymakers in the area of AI for social good from India and the Asia-Pacific region participated in the For the Asia-Pacific Meet on AI and Philanthropy, in collaboration with the Geneva Centre for Philanthropy. The room carried a mix of curiosity and caution. When someone asked whether AI gave people hope or worry, hands went up slowly, unevenly.

Into this atmosphere walked two women whose work shows what AI can look like in the real world, inside classrooms, farms and rural markets. Talitha Amalia, co-founder of Solve Education!, a Singapore-based global nonprofit focused on improving education and job opportunities for underserved youth, drew on her experience working with millions of learners. Nirupa Sanjenbam, from the charitable trust MaolKeki Foundation in Imphal, Manipur, brought the grounded clarity of someone who works every day in communities that technology often forgets.

Talitha opened with a reminder that’s easy to overlook in conversations about technology: learning has to be engaging if we want young people to stay with it. In her view, AI isn’t here to replace teachers, it’s here to give them space to do what humans do best. “The simplest technology becomes the most powerful when it is co-designed with teachers and students,” she said. And for her team, “simple” truly means simple: WhatsApp bots, lightweight apps, SMS-based nudges. Tools that don’t buckle under bad connectivity or shared devices.

Their AI coach takes over repetitive teaching tasks such as grammar drills and problem sets so that teachers can focus on building trust, confidence and curiosity. It’s a refreshingly human use of AI. And it’s working: studies show their “brain points” system boosts learning outcomes significantly, and their reach, across rural India, Nigeria, Indonesia, keeps expanding without ballooning costs.

If Talitha’s world is about reaching millions, Nirupa’s is about making sure even one overlooked community doesn’t get erased. Manipur, she explained, is full of tech talent: people working as engineers and developers across India. But the state itself often remains digitally invisible. “Our communities are data invisible, not because they don’t exist, but because systems have never learned how to see them,” she said.

Despite years of conflict and limited infrastructure, small tech companies in Manipur are building precision agriculture tools, and the government is attempting to set up an IT special economic zone. The potential is there, it just needs the right kind of support.

That’s where the MaolKeki Foundation comes in. Their approach to AI is small, practical and deeply rooted in local needs. They use AI to help rural entrepreneurs create marketing content. They experiment with AI-generated videos to streamline internal communication. They help collect voice data for Project Vaani (a collaboration between IIT Madras and Google Research creating large-scale speech datasets for Indian languages, especially those that are under-represented or completely missing in existing AI systems) so that Manipuri dialects don’t disappear from tomorrow’s speech technologies. They support internships where students learn machine learning hands-on.

And threading through all of this is philanthropy. Prof. Giuseppe Ugazio, Professor in Behavioural Philanthropy and Finance at the University of Geneva, pointed out that the social sector often hesitates around AI—not because people are unwilling, but because the tools feel distant, too technical, too expensive. Philanthropy can act as the bridge: offering patient funding, building trust and paying for early experiments that private companies would never touch.

Nirupa shared a story that made this clear. A philanthropic trust offered catalytic funding, a local IT company stepped in with their tech and her foundation anchored the project on the ground. Together, they helped rural sellers join the Open Network for Digital Commerce (a Government of India initiative that aims to make online commerce open, decentralised and accessible to everyone, especially small sellers)—a shift that might sound small, but for the people involved, it opens access to entirely new markets. “Technology gains its purpose only when it listens to the people it hopes to serve,” she said.

Another idea that came up repeatedly was the need for a shared, ethical data commons—a way for organisations to pool anonymised insights, learn from one another and build AI models grounded in real social contexts rather than inherited biases. Without this foundation, experts warned, AI tools for nonprofits will either hallucinate (where AI systems guess or invent details) or misinterpret. With it, the social sector could move faster, respond better and base decisions on evidence rather than instinct.

The stories Talitha and Nirupa shared showed that AI’s role in the social sector will take shape not only in boardrooms and labs, but also in classrooms where teachers have more time for students, on farms where data supports planting decisions, in rural towns where entrepreneurs go online for the first time and in places like Manipur, where being recognised by technology can itself be meaningful.