The AI Opportunity Inventory is a multi-stakeholder initiative designed to identify, catalogue, and analyze artificial intelligence use cases that have the potential to meaningfully contribute to major societal goals.
From improving healthcare outcomes and educational access to accelerating energy development and enhancing disaster response, AI presents profound opportunities.
Our goal is to make these opportunities transparent, accessible, and actionable for a diverse group of actors, including policymakers, researchers, investors, and civil society organizations.
By systematically mapping the landscape of AI uses tailored to public policy problems, we aim to foster collaboration, direct resources effectively, and inform policy that accelerates innovation for the public good.
Every AI use case presents the possibility of positive and negative social outcomes. This inventory explicitly focuses on the opportunity for positive results. A focus on AI opportunities reflects our observation that policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders have often struggled to find such use cases outside of company press releases and blog posts. We welcome and celebrate work to scrutinize submissions, as we plan to do so ourselves!
Our Process
Our methodology is built on a three-step process designed to ensure transparency, accessibility, and rigorous evaluation.
1. Entry: AI Opportunity Submissions
This is the foundational step where we collect detailed information about a specific AI use case. We invite submissions from academic researchers, civil society organizations, government bodies, and AI labs of all sizes. The submission form is designed to capture the critical context of an AI application, including the problem it addresses, the specific model or system used, the communities it benefits, the nature and scale of its impact (whether realized or potential), its geographic scope, and any known barriers to its broader adoption.
2. The Raw Opportunity Bank
Transparency is a core principle of this initiative. All submitted entries are first populated into our Raw Opportunity Bank. This publicly accessible database provides an unfiltered view of the incoming data. We believe this open approach allows for broader community engagement, enabling researchers and organizations to see and assess the landscape of emerging opportunities for themselves, fostering independent analysis and collaboration.
3. The Vetted Opportunity Bank
Opportunities from the Raw Bank are selected for deeper analysis by a dedicated interdisciplinary team comprising students and faculty from Brown University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas School of Law. This team vets each opportunity against a carefully developed set of criteria assessing its impact, scalability, ethical considerations, and alignment with societal goals. The opportunities that pass this rigorous review are moved into the Vetted Opportunity Bank, serving as a curated, high-confidence resource for decision-makers. The precise vetting framework is currently being finalized and will be published publicly to ensure process transparency.
Collaborators
- Kevin Frazier, The University of Texas School of Law
- Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Center for Tech Responsibility, Brown University
- B Cavello, Aspen Digital, The Aspen Institute
- Rachael Samberg, Director, Scholarly Communication & Information Policy, UC Berkeley Library
- Adefoluke Shemsu, SeedAI & Horizon Institute for Public Service
- Matthew Sag, Emory University School of Law
- Diane Staheli, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
- Dan Zhao, NYU & MIT
- Cherry Wu, Independent
- Alexander Schneider, Independent