Humanitarian groups working in conflict zones are finding that agentic AI can shorten the research cycle between a crisis and an informed response.

Cloudera Inc. has built its AI strategy around deployment flexibility, and one nonprofit partner is testing that approach on the front lines. But the aim is to give analysts a faster starting point, not to automate research, according to Aaron Eubank (pictured), director of data science at Prosper Global, formerly Mercy Corps.

“It’s not the final report that’s going to be pushed out to the humanitarian community and teams, but rather a starting point that analysts can use to continue to iterate on their own research,” Eubank said. “We want to keep the agency in the hands of the researchers themselves.”

Eubank spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Paul Gillin at EVOLVE26, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how multi-agent AI is accelerating humanitarian research, VERA’s early results in conflict zones and the importance of keeping researchers in control. (* Disclosure below.)

Agentic AI meets the humanitarian fog of war

Prosper Global works in about 30 countries with communities facing conflict, climate change and economic hardship. Its crisis analysts’ research could take days to weeks, so the organization built VERA with Cloudera, a multi-agent research engine that uses Cloudera AI Studios, runs on Amazon Web Services Inc. and taps models from Anthropic PBC. Agents pull from sources such as ReliefWeb, conflict tracker ACLED and local news, and a final agent assembles the findings, Eubank explained.