AWS re:Invent 2025 - From Data to Action: Agentic-Powered Humanitarian Response (AIM222)

Summary of AWS re:Invent 2025 - From Data to Action: Agentic-Powered Humanitarian Response (AIM222)

Overview

This session presented a collaboration between Cloudera and Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian organization, to develop an AI-powered solution for crisis analysis and humanitarian response. The solution leverages agentic AI workflows to accelerate data research and analysis, enabling Mercy Corps' teams to make more informed and timely decisions in rapidly changing, data-scarce environments.

The Challenge

• Mercy Corps' crisis analysis teams spend a significant amount of time (790 hours per month) conducting research and gathering data across various sources to develop their analysis products.
• With tightening budgets and resources in the humanitarian sector, Mercy Corps needed to find ways to do more with less, focusing on how to best leverage their existing human resources.
• Traditional language models and search tools were not providing the specialized, contextualized information the crisis analysis teams required, leading to data silos and suboptimal decision-making.

The Agentic AI Solution

• Cloudera and Mercy Corps collaborated to develop an agentic AI-powered platform that could streamline the crisis analysis workflow.
• The solution utilizes Cloudera's Agent Studio, which allows for the creation of domain-specific AI agents that can prioritize and process data sources relevant to key humanitarian themes (e.g., food security, water security, conflict).
• These agentic workflows are designed to be more specialized and effective than general language models, providing the crisis analysis teams with targeted, high-quality information to support their decision-making.
• The platform is built on Cloudera's "Anywhere Cloud" data platform, which enables deployment across multiple cloud environments and data centers, addressing Mercy Corps' complex regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.

Technical Details

• The solution integrates with various data sources, including social media, traditional media, and satellite data, to provide a comprehensive information base for the crisis analysis teams.
• The agentic workflows are built using Cloudera's Agent Studio, which allows for the creation of specialized AI agents that can be easily configured and updated.
• The platform leverages Cloudera's data engineering, data warehousing, and streaming capabilities to ingest, process, and deliver the relevant information to the crisis analysis teams.
• A no-code/low-code interface is provided to enable Mercy Corps' non-technical staff to easily interact with and customize the platform.

Business Impact

• By reducing the time spent on research and data gathering by 50%, the solution frees up Mercy Corps' crisis analysis teams to focus on higher-value analysis and decision-making.
• The platform's ability to maintain and expand data sources, as well as its adaptability to changing regulatory environments, ensures that Mercy Corps can continue to provide critical humanitarian aid and support even in the face of tightening budgets and resources.
• The agentic AI workflows enable the crisis analysis teams to access more specialized and contextualized information, leading to better-informed decisions and more effective humanitarian interventions.

Use Case and Adoption

• Mercy Corps is currently piloting the solution in Sudan, where a single crisis analysis team is using the platform to develop a report on food security across the country.
• The platform's ability to address data silos and provide a unified information source is expected to significantly improve the team's efficiency and the quality of their analysis.
• Ensuring user adoption and trust in the platform has been a key focus, with Mercy Corps and Cloudera working closely to align the solution with the crisis analysis teams' workflows and requirements.

Future Developments

• Cloudera's "Anywhere Cloud" data platform, which underpins the solution, is designed to provide a consistent, cloud-native experience across multiple cloud environments and data centers, addressing Mercy Corps' complex regulatory and data sovereignty needs.
• The platform's modular, containerized architecture and agentic AI capabilities are expected to enable rapid expansion and customization to support other humanitarian use cases and organizations.
• As the regulatory landscape around AI evolves, the platform's governance and compliance features will be crucial in ensuring the responsible and ethical use of these technologies in the humanitarian sector.