(Associate) Director, Program Innovation & Evidence, The AI Access Initiative

About The AI Access Initiative (2AI)

We"re at an inflection point in artificial intelligence - presenting both tremendous potential opportunity and risk for people in developing countries. AI capabilities are improving on a timescale measured in months, while development systems often move on timescales measured in decades. Much of the technology needed for positive impact exists today, but few organizations exist to bridge research, deployment, and scaled implementation: we must act now to ensure AI"s benefits reach people in poverty in LMICs.

Incubated at Evidence Action, we"re scaling The AI Access Initiative, an organization focused on scaling AI-enabled "big bets" to benefit tens or hundreds of millions of people in poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We operate at the intersection of global development actors, top AI labs, and leading researchers to drive meaningful access to AI"s benefits for the 3.5 billion people living in poverty globally. We create "public good," open-sourced playbooks, toolkits, and insights that define how to design and launch tractable and impactful AI-enabled programs. Given the scale of opportunity, we expect our portfolio to expand substantially, but to start, we"re scaling two programs focused on AI in Agriculture and AI in Health.

We are led by former Evidence Action CEO Kanika Bahl, a founding member of Anthropic"s Long-Term Benefit Trust, and advised by Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; and Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs for Alphabet and Google. This work builds on Evidence Action"s track record reaching 530M+ people with cost-effective, evidence-based programs across 9 countries in Africa and Asia, with a focus on last-mile delivery.

The Role

2AI is building fast. We have a founding team, two live program portfolios, and a pipeline of opportunities that will drive significant expansion. The programs we are running have credible pathways to 100s of millions of people. While incubated at Evidence Action, we plan to spin out in Q4 '26.

Our Agriculture portfolio is scaling AI-enabled weather forecasting services to reach tens of millions of smallholder farmers, in close partnership with state and national governments in India and soon other low-and-middle income countries. We are seeking a rigorous, high-ownership Associate Director or Director, Program Innovation & Evidence to own the engine behind this work: testing and improving how forecasts are formatted, framed, and delivered; developing new forecast types in partnership with leading academics; and building the cost-effectiveness evidence base that determines what we scale.

This role reports into the VP, Agriculture and includes people leadership, managing at least one senior manager across the program.

You Will:

• Own forecast message testing: Run A/B tests across format, framing, and delivery mechanism to best practices for what drives farmer comprehension and behavior change.
• Scope and pilot new forecast delivery channels: Identify and test emerging distribution channels for forecasts, such as chatbots, WhatsApp, SMS, social media, etc., assessing reach, cost, and effectiveness against existing channels.
• Oversee development of novel forecasts: Partner with academics to develop high-impact forecasts of new types, managing a roadmap for how new forecasts are prioritized, developed, and benchmarked. This could include hiring and managing post-doctoral students to support in model benchmarking or dataset support.
• Support monitoring and evaluation (M&E): Coordinate with in-country teams to implement M&E and identify concrete ways to improve programs based on the insights.
• Lead cost-effectiveness analysis: Develop and update cost-effectiveness (CE) analyses for our agriculture programs, and stay abreast of the emerging evidence base.
• Scope other agriculture innovations: Assess new directions for the portfolio, including benchmarking, advisory services, and entirely new intervention types.
• Partner with stakeholders: Create new and nurture existing relationships with academic institutions, research groups, delivery partners, and other agriculture organizations.
• Develop best practices and thought leadership: Across all of the above, build best practices and replicable toolkits that can be applied elsewhere by others. Share key learnings with the sector through toolkits, blogs, and other public-good resources.