How AI is powering a new wave of activism

Paul Duan was working as a data scientist at Eventbrite in San Francisco by day, and volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens by night. He realized one day that he wanted to use AI to help unemployed people find jobs--a core mission of his Paris, France-based nonprofit Bayes Impact. Bayes Impact uses data to build social services fit for a better future. "When you work at a soup kitchen, you serve a soup one by one to each individual, and it feels great," says Duan, "But then it gets really sad because you see that there are 50 people in line behind the person, and you know that behind the closed door of the shelter you have 10,000 more on the streets. So the one question that came to mind was, 'how can we impact people at the biggest scale?'"