Is anyone using AI for good?
Source: Stack Overflow Blog
The Rise of AI‑Driven Optimism
When the first wave of modern‑day AI hype started, a lot of people I knew were worried. Much of that worry has, so far and unfortunately, been well‑founded. AI has done a lot of what people were afraid it would do: it’s pushed people out of jobs, consumed massive amounts of water and energy, and warped our ideas of reality, friendship, and community. Bad look, all around.
I can’t remember when I personally became aware of AI’s rapid spread—probably 2023, like most non‑technical people. What I do remember are the key moments since then when AI seemed to have an outsized impact on my life:
- Getting laid off.
- Being subsequently told by my mentor I should consider career paths outside of writing.
- Struggling to find work when, as my mentor predicted, much of the job market for creatives was rocked by the generative‑AI boom.
- Late‑night, despair‑ridden, anxiety‑laden, Wing‑Stop‑fueled conversations with friends about our futures, society’s future, and the earth’s future.
- Now, when much of my writing for Stack Overflow has—unsurprisingly—been about AI.
A First Glimpse of AI for Good
A few years ago I learned about a woman developing an AI tool to help people appeal insurance claims, borne from her own experience of being denied for small, sometimes incomprehensible reasons. Her theory was that an AI trained on data about successful appeals could help everyday consumers take on the mentally taxing and tedious task of appealing insurance denials.
The project—ultimately a labor of love for creator Holden Karau and her business partner Melanie Warrick—is now the completely free tool Fight Health Insurance. To this day it’s helping people appeal bogus insurance denials.
It was the first time I saw someone using AI just to help people—not to make a quick buck, increase productivity, or start a viral sensation—just to help people. As the meme goes, “Great use of free will.”
In a time when the only thing my friends and I seemed to talk about was how bad AI would become if someone didn’t stop it (and how powerless we were to stop it, just a bunch of 20‑somethings barely scraping by), here was a person who could adapt, take what was being offered by the world, and turn it around to do something actually good, just because they could.
From that point on I used Fight Health Insurance as a rebuttal to the doom‑and‑gloom approach to AI my friends would take. I’m a pretty clear‑cut optimist, which can sometimes get on my loved ones’ nerves. FHI was a strong weapon in my favor—it’s hard to counter the argument that it’s helping people, at scale, in a way that wouldn’t be possible without AI.
My friends’ rebuttals would usually be along the lines of, “Well, one good thing doesn’t negate all these other bad things that AI is causing.” Which is true.
But what about a bunch of good things?
What if we all did enough good things to make a dent in the bad?
AI for Good: What It Means
The good news: Holden’s work with AI is not the only example out there, and I’m here to tell you about a few of them happening, here and now. Not all the organizations I’ll be featuring have the same highly personal and selfless backstory as Fight Health Insurance, but they all share one thing in common: they’re taking our modern technological revolution in stride and using it for the good of humanity.
Defining “AI for Good”
For me, an organization qualifies for the “AI for good” category if it deeply embeds AI technology into its work, either as a major function or as a way to scale. “Do‑goodery” is harder to define, but I’m calling it work whose mission is solely focused on:
- Solving humanitarian issues.
- Preserving the environment / fighting climate change.
- Helping the every‑man.
These efforts can range from detecting earthquakes for better disaster response, to reducing textile waste with AI inspection, to assisting everyday people with insurance‑claim appeals. Ultimately, the work needs to positively impact people, the earth, or our society to be considered “doing good.”
Even with that fairly specific scope, the possibilities that AI affords do‑gooders are limited only by their imaginations. As Ryan Panchadsaram, Technical Adviser at Kleiner Perkins, succinctly told me:
“My perspective on AI is that it is an incredible technology that can unlock so many areas of good for society.”
Spotlight: Canary Speech
To illustrate this, let me tell you about Canary Speech. While AI‑augmented healthcare is nothing new—and clearly on its way to becoming an integral part of our medical system, if OpenAI’s newest product is to be believed—what Canary Speech does is different.
Canary Speech was founded ten years ago by former NIH researchers Jeff Adams and Henry O’Connell—who would both go on to have illustrious commercial careers (working on Siri, leading HP, inventing Alexa after leaving the NIH). They decided to do one more thing with their expertise of voice: use it to diagnose disease.
Today, their AI tech can identify vocal biomarkers in patients to help clinicians detect and diagnose disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and anxiety.
- The work doesn’t just use AI; it exists because of AI.
- Long before the current AI boom, Adams and O’Connell were using neural‑network machine learning to research and identify these vocal biomarkers.
- They’ve now identified over 2,500 speech features.
If you’re wondering how much of this is real, check out their recently published peer‑reviewed study with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School on the effectiveness of AI voice analysis for Parkinson’s detection.
The AI‑for‑good movement is still in its early days, but stories like Fight Health Insurance and Canary Speech show that, when wielded responsibly, AI can be a force for genuine, scalable positive change.
# Screening for Parkinson’s Detection
What’s most meaningful to me is the human experiences that the team at **Canary Speech** shared. During a routine postpartum check‑up, a new mother told her clinician that she “felt fine,” but her Canary Speech score came back with high levels of depression and anxiety. Based on her score, the clinician took the time to discuss her wellbeing on a deeper level, and this conversation allowed the new mother to open up and share that she had been struggling, quite a lot, since the birth. She was able to get care for her postpartum depression—something that might not have happened without Canary Speech’s AI.
Here is the good that is possible when we give AI tools to human experts, who wield them for the benefit of others. Canary Speech is, under FDA guidelines, a **clinical decision‑support tool**. It gives medical professionals a new way to identify patient needs that are sitting under the surface. In the case of the new mother, Canary Speech’s AI prompted the human clinician to have a human conversation with the patient, ultimately leading to medical care. As the saying goes: *a canary in the coal mine*—an early warning system, only possible because Canary Speech put powerful AI in the right hands.
It’s easy to see how this AI tool could benefit overloaded hospitals, underserved healthcare deserts, and patients without access to affordable care. In just one visit, vulnerable populations (like elderly people with Parkinson’s) or those who may be reluctant to seek care for themselves (like busy, overwhelmed new parents) can get potentially life‑saving diagnoses, reducing the time and energy needed to receive necessary healthcare. And this early‑detection system has only been made possible **because of AI**.
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## AI + Human Expertise in Action
Canary Speech isn’t the only company combining AI and human expertise for good. Ryan Panchadsaram, one of the leaders of **[Speed & Scale](https://speedandscale.com/)**’s climate‑action plan, has seen experts across industries “apply [AI] to all of society's most pressing problems: climate, healthcare, education.”
This sort of expertise drives much of the work of the fellows from **[AWS Compute for Climate](https://aws.amazon.com/startups/learn/announcement-the-compute-for-climate-fellowships-2025-cohort-is-here?lang=en-US)**. **[Lisbeth Kaufman](https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/03/14/can-climate-tech-startups-address-the-current-crisis/)**, Head of Climate Tech Startups BD at AWS, told me:
> “The founders in the Compute for Climate Fellowship show that when AI is designed thoughtfully with ethics, efficiency, and impact at the center, it can be a powerful force for humanitarian and planetary good.”
I was lucky enough to connect with two of the founders in the fellowship—**Aigen** and **Smartex**—both working to lessen humanity’s impact on the earth and climate.
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## Aigen – Autonomous Agriculture Robots
**[Aigen](https://www.aigen.io/)**, led by founder‑CEO **Kenny Lee**, operates in the agritech space, helping small, family farms automate processes and stay viable using autonomous agriculture robots.
> “The average age of the farmer in the US is close to 60 years old, holding on to operations their families built over generations. They are one bad season away from losing everything.” – Kenny Lee
Lee explains the challenges:
- Small farms can’t afford enough labor.
- They can’t compete with industrial‑scale operations.
- There’s often no successor because the economics don’t work for the next generation.
### How Aigen Helps
- **Scalable robots** that run 12+ hours daily on solar power alone.
- **Edge AI** processes data directly in hardware, bypassing the cloud and delivering real‑time decisions (millions per hour).
- **Computer‑vision weed control**: robots recognize and catalogue plants with speed and accuracy beyond human capability, mechanically weeding vast fields and eliminating the need for chemical sprays.
> “Farms are messy, unpredictable environments. Without AI, we'd be stuck blanket‑spraying chemicals or hand‑weeding at costs farmers can't afford… AI is the only reason this works.” – Kenny Lee
Aigen’s technology—recognizing thousands of plant images per minute—gives small farms a fighting chance against monopolization by large corporations. The goal is to democratize access to advanced farming tools, taking on the back‑breaking, costly, and dangerous work that farmers currently endure.
> “The family farm in North Dakota should have the same access and capabilities as the industrial operation in California.” – Kenny Lee
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## Smartex – Reducing Textile Waste
**[Smartex](https://www.smartex.ai/)**, another AWS Compute for Climate fellow, uses AI to cut textile waste—a growing environmental issue driven by fast fashion.
**Max Easton**, CEO of Smartex, explains their impact:
- Their technology integrates directly into factory machinery, catching defects early (e.g., before dyeing or cutting).
- By identifying errors sooner, they dramatically reduce the amount of waste that would otherwise be discarded.
*“We’re fundamentally changing the way we manufacture textiles, turning what was once an unavoidable by‑product into a preventable loss.”* – Max Easton
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### Takeaway
Both **Canary Speech** and the **AWS Compute for Climate** fellows illustrate how thoughtfully designed AI—paired with human expertise—can serve as early‑warning systems, efficiency boosters, and catalysts for humanitarian and planetary good. By placing powerful AI tools in the hands of clinicians, farmers, and manufacturers, we unlock solutions that were previously impossible, paving the way for healthier people and a healthier planet.AI‑Powered Defect Detection & Sustainable Manufacturing
Smartex’s defect detection system allows factories to save resources and reduce waste.
“We inspect 100 % of fabric production in real time, automatically detect defects, stop repetitive issues, and generate objective quality data for every roll produced,” Easton explained.
This process turns quality control from a reactive checkpoint into a preventive system, using less energy, consuming less water, and lowering CO₂ emissions for factories. It isn’t limited to one or two sites—the technology can be deployed globally, and every time a single model improves, the rest improve as well. Easton calls this a “multiplier effect,” which translates into thousands of tonnes of fabric waste avoided.
“AI has enormous potential when it is applied to invisible, systemic problems, especially in industries that employ millions of people but have been historically under‑invested in technology.”
— Easton
Often that means helping underserved communities that perform hard, laborious, and dangerous work for low pay. In manufacturing, AI can improve working conditions by removing guesswork and firefighting from daily operations. When factories become more efficient and predictable, they become more resilient—economically and socially.
AI Is Core to Smartex’s Mission
Like Aigen, Smartex’s work is only possible because of AI. Easton notes:
“AI is inseparable from both our product and our mission. Without AI, real‑time inspection at full production speed simply wouldn’t be possible. More importantly, the data foundation we create is objective, real‑time, and covers 100 % of output, which only exists because AI captures and structures it automatically.”
AI for Climate & Humanitarian Impact
Aigen and Smartex are moving the needle in the fight against climate change, alongside other Compute for Climate fellows such as Realta Fusion.
“The climate crisis is moving faster than traditional systems can keep up. We’re seeing extreme weather, food and water stress, and energy challenges collide. At the same time, many of the most promising solutions just aren’t possible without serious computing power.”
— Kaufman, Compute for Climate
For these fellows, AI has improved speed, efficiency, and precision, allowing startups to move beyond pilots and operate at a planetary scale.
“We see it dramatically speed up research and development, whether that’s running fusion energy simulations, improving extreme‑weather forecasting, or accelerating advances in agriculture. What used to take years can now happen in weeks.”
— Kaufman
Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab
The Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab supports researchers and NGOs tackling sustainability, climate, and conservation challenges.
- Amazon rainforest protection – partnership with the Alexander von Humboldt Institute to fight illegal deforestation, monitor endangered wildlife, and identify species via AI bioacoustics.
- Human‑rights‑focused AI – collaborations with Planet, Catholic Relief Services, and SEEDS India to build early‑detection systems for disaster resilience, hunger forecasting, and extreme‑heat mapping.
These systems have delivered tangible benefits:
- Faster disaster‑relief in post‑earthquake Afghanistan.
- Proactive intervention during food insecurity in southern Malawi.
- Precise Red Cross response during the Lahaina fires on Maui.
You Don’t Need Big Tech to Do Good with AI
You don’t need the backing of AWS or Microsoft to make a positive impact. Everyone can put powerful AI tools in the right hands—our own.
In the next part of this series, some of my favorite AI do‑gooders will share how you and I can use AI for good in everyday life.