How IV.AI Is Pioneering Human-Centered AI For Business And Social Good

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

How can artificial intelligence be used to create positive social impact?

I recently sat down with Vince Lynch, CEO of IV.AI, to explore how his company has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to not only drive business innovation but also address some of the world’s most pressing social challenges. Founded eight years ago, IV.AI has rapidly grown into a global platform, utilizing AI to transform chaotic data into actionable insights while focusing strongly on human-centered solutions.

With partnerships ranging from the United Nations to the World Ethical Data Foundation, IV.AI is setting a new standard for how AI can be both profitable and a force for good.

Vince Lynch, CEO IV.AI | IV.AI

The initial idea behind IV.AI came from a group of scientists and business professionals with experience at tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Spotify, and Oracle. These experts shared a common passion for AI and a vision of using it to solve complex business problems by transforming chaotic information into structured, actionable insights, teaching people to solve tricky things.

“We knew we could make AI ‘smart,’ but it didn’t matter if the outputs couldn’t connect to a human process. Our tools and systems were working, and we quickly grew to seven offices in four continents. We chose IV.AI as the domain because we were first to the party. IV is a mirror flip of AI, and that’s what we do as a business—we flip AI to make it more human; this way, people can trust models to make decisions,” Lynch shared, emphasizing their mission to bridge AI outputs with human decision-making.

One of the standout aspects of IV.AI's journey is its commitment to using AI for social good. Lynch discussed how the company, driven by both revenue and a desire to make a positive impact, allocated part of its research and development budget to solving pressing global issues. “We partnered with amazing researchers and NGOs to help solve challenging problems,” said Lynch. This led to a partnership with SustainChain, a joint effort between the United Nations and the US Coalition of Sustainability, which earned IV.AI the prestigious AI 100 award from UNESCO.

The focus of these partnerships was tackling hard challenges such as “how do you distill complicated sources of truth or manage disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation,” and their work with the World Ethical Data Foundation (WEDF) is a prime example. IV.AI was able to organize and capture the knowledge of the crowd, receive feedback from the public, and publish a free-to-use and always-updating Open Standard for Ethical AI, with the input of over 30,000 data scientists worldwide.

The partnership has been covered by outlets like the BBC and CNBC, underscoring the global reach and importance of the work. This initiative now engages more than 90,000 individuals, creating a collaborative platform where the public can provide live feedback, helping inform how AI can evolve responsibly. “We’re also working with WEDF on doing the same thing for ERA with human rights data. ERA is an advanced analytical archive that’s a great example of how really powerful technology can organize information at scale and make it accessible through a nonprofit. It involves some pretty amazing innovations, and we’ll be helping WEDF with the analytics for a digital public good that will have a hugely positive effect in an area that really couldn’t be more important,” Lynch added.

In terms of real-world applications, Lynch highlighted how companies and governing bodies have begun using strategies and insights from IV.AI’s frameworks, developed in collaboration with the WEDF, to inform regulation and AI systems. For instance, one of Lynch's key contributions was the “Me, We, It” framework—representing the builder (Me), the working group that reduces bias and silos (We), and the model itself (It). The addition of a fourth structure, “Them,” representing the users, came from the WEDF community itself.

“One of the public (non-data science) WEDF community members made a brilliant suggestion to add “Them” as a final part of the framework. Because WEDF had built this amazing tool that enabled the public to have a say, we could take into account this live public feedback and adjust alongside this large group. It is wild to see how opening up information to everyone, making it freely accessible, and organized in a way that creates useful structures, enables this kind of collaboration across skill sets and languages, and can include everyone around the world. In my opinion, this is why AI is so important; it gives us a scaffolding to collaborate and move more efficiently,” Lynch shared, illustrating how community-driven feedback can improve AI frameworks in real time.

Aggregate analytics | IV.AI

Lynch also described how IV.AI’s work with the United Nations through SustainChain is driving sustainability initiatives worldwide. Similarly to the work with WEDF, IV.AI built a model for making sense of sustainability data for 3,500 public corporations around the world. That foundation model was very high quality and able to be plugged into SustainChain, and now it classifies sustainability projects for all the users of that platform who are trying to find support, partnerships, and make an impact.

When discussing how IV.AI manages its budget to prioritize social good, Lynch recalled the early conversations with John Marshall, CEO of WEDF. “The budgeting part was tricky. We had to ensure we could anchor into different social good workflows where we could drive value and then assign resources to help solve the challenge. The WEDF stuff came from a series of many conversations between myself and John Marshall, the CEO of WEDF. I was able to get a sense of their incredible technology stack and mission with the foundation. We aligned on how the technology could inform different problems and how the IV tech could fit it. I fell in love with their mission and joined them as an advisor,” Lynch stated, adding that when AI went mainstream in 2023, this collaborative spirit helped accelerate their work.

"I took this idea of crowdsourcing all of the AI people to John and the team at WEDF and discovered that John had already been thinking along the same lines. Within a week, we had a plan, and three weeks later, we had the first Open Standard.” WEDF already had a massive community of researchers and data scientists. They also had a tech platform that enabled anonymous and safe sharing. We put it all together and made it happen,” he shared, highlighting the speed and scale at which IV.AI and WEDF were able to act once they aligned on a common goal.

Lynch also pointed to the role of Jacqueline Corbelli, CEO of the US Coalition of Sustainability, in their work with SustainChain, further illustrating how open sharing and collaboration can lead to impactful solutions.

Lynch concluded by reflecting on the importance of strategic cost management in AI structures, noting that, "“If you think about cost strategically in your AI structures at the beginning, you can see this scalable benefit down the line. The premise of a magic AI that solves all your problems is a fallacy, but the combining of great humans, software, and AI will turn these massive challenges into magical results.”

For Lynch and IV.AI, the key to creating lasting impact lies in the combination of great humans, innovative software, and AI—a formula that continues to drive their success in both the business and social arenas. By focusing on collaboration, open standards, and scalability, IV.AI is paving the way for the future of AI in both commercial and nonprofit sectors.