UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents

UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents. 25% off tickets now Back by popular demand: Save up to $300 on Disrupt Close Image Credits:Matthias Balk/picture alliance / Getty Images AI UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents Jagmeet Singh 1:00 PM PDT · September 17, 2026 The United Nations on Thursday announced that it is working with Google to make its vast collection of global statistics easier for AI systems to access and use.

What happened

“And [we are] taking this moment to also make our data AI-ready. ” Google. org provided $2 million in capacity-building funding and technical support to establish the platform’s core infrastructure. Alongside enabling AI agents to retrieve individual statistics, Google demonstrated how an AI system connected to the UN data through MCP could pull together multiple indicators and use them to generate dashboards, charts, and written analysis without a user having to manually find and combine the underlying datasets.

Called the UN System Data Commons, the new system is built on Google’s open source Data Commons platform and lets people search for statistics from across UN agencies using natural-language queries. Prem Ramaswami, who leads Google’s Data Commons team, told TechCrunch that the system is hosted on a UN-governed instance and is intended to eventually be maintained, operated, and scaled independently by the UN. Google launched Data Commons in 2018 as an effort to organize public datasets from different sources into a common framework.

Last year, it added support for MCP, allowing AI agents to directly query Data Commons for statistics and their sources. However, giving an AI system authoritative data does not necessarily make its conclusions authoritative.

The wider picture

Topics AI, Google, Google Data Commons, Government & Policy, unicef, united nations, United States When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The new institute aims to surface differing views between Google, Google DeepMind, and the broader global research community around AGI. Hyperscale – Paris MarxFrom the journalist and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, this is a deep investigation into the physical impact of AI data centers around the world, and the toll they are taking on local communities and the global environment.

These two tech critic academics argue that this kind of rhetoric is “AI hype” – lies and exaggerations that are helping rich people make more money “by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity”. ByFaisal IslamEconomics editorThere is an eerie low hum that emanates from data centres, where tens of thousands of chips make trillions of computations a second to help drive the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Data centres, such as this Google site under construction in Hertfordshire, are becoming increasingly common across the UKIn recent days, alarming warnings of threats to humanity have created a din, but it is these low hums that have stirred a backlash in the US which now threatens to envelop its midterm elections, and could cross the Atlantic and come to the UK.

Stories abound of local townspeople seeing energy bills soar when they are asked to foot the bill for the infrastructure needed to power new data centres, or finding their already stretched water supplies further diminished. The new Democratic Governors in New Jersey and Virginia (home to the largest global concentration of data centres), went much further with legislation compelling new energy tariffs for data centres, and disclosure of energy and water use.

What has been reported

Jensen Huang, chief of AI chipmaker Nvidia, took to social media in August to make the case for data centres as the essential agent of US reindustrialisation. It views data centres as underpinning public services and crucial to attract investment and allow Britain to compete in the global economy. Take the skull (💀), for example, which has come to be used as a reaction for finding something funny – a visual shorthand for the slang phrase: “I’m dead. ” Or the wilting rose (🥀) which was, according to Google data analysed by the New York Times, the fastest-growing emoji in terms of popularity in 2025 – and was the 93rd most used.

The shift comes after a UNICEF test found leading AI models struggled to accurately retrieve global development statistics. It replaces the existing UNData portal, where users largely had to browse and search for statistics through a more traditional database interface. The new platform also supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows AI systems to connect directly to external data sources. Users increasingly turn to AI tools for answers, but many systems still struggle to reliably surface authoritative data.

A UNICEF benchmark of six large language models across more than 133,000 responses to questions about global development indicators produced an average accuracy score of just 21.

What happens next

The organization said it plans to release its methodology, code, and data alongside the paper. UNICEF has also seen a sharp rise this year in traffic from generative AI assistants to its data website, which receives more than 6 million visits a month and is among the agency’s most popular websites. The UN said 26 of its entities have committed to the Data Commons, with data from nearly 20 available at launch. Moreover, it aims to bring 80% of the UN system’s statistical datasets onto the platform by 2027.

Image Credits:Google “We are orders of magnitude more advanced in scale, scope, and flexibility, connecting for the first time across so many agencies across the UN system,” said Shantanu Mukherjee, acting director of the UN Statistics Division. “We have taken a “train-the-trainer” approach throughout the rollout, and we have already seen the UN system team ramp up quickly,” Ramaswami said. The UN’s platform also keeps track of where each statistic comes from, so people can trace data retrieved by an AI system back to the original UN source.

The report has been compiled by The Daily Waves using information reported across techcrunch.com, theguardian.com, bbc.co.uk. Details are presented according to the information available at the time of publication and may change as authorities, organisers or other relevant parties provide updates.