People Operations Associate Director/Director, The AI Access Initiative

About The AI Access Initiative

We’re at an inflection point in artificial intelligence — presenting both tremendous potential opportunity and risk for people in developing countries: rather than allowing the poverty gap to expand, low-income countries have an opportunity to leapfrog development milestones with AI-powered innovations. Incubated at Evidence Action, we’re launching 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 will operate at the intersection of global development actors, top AI labs, and leading researchers to drive meaningful access to the benefits of AI for the 3.5 billion people living in poverty globally. We will 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 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.

Our Approach

We’re building an AI-native organization focused on designing solutions to reach tens or hundreds of millions of individuals living in poverty. We will focus both on delivering near-term, tractable direct impact as well as assisting governments to grow capacity and build enabling environments for the AI for Good ecosystem, including:

• Launching AI-enabled interventions to impact tens or hundreds of millions, such as delivering AI-enabled forecasts to smallholder farmers to improve yields and earnings, leveraging AI to dramatically improve medical diagnosis and treatment, implementing frontier systems to identify and mitigate disease outbreaks, or putting personalized AI tutors into the hands of students to drive reductions to system-level educational attainment gaps. When relevant, we will partner with leading AI labs to shape technical offerings, including adapting for underrepresented languages, bandwidth constraints, etc.
• Partnering with governments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to drive regulatory changes, policy, and investments necessary to unlock beneficial use cases at national scale, while proactively mitigating the downside risks of AI.

Building on our recent Cross-Sector Analysis of near and medium-term AI opportunities in LMICs, we are advancing the highest-scoring interventions through a rigorous vetting process, including evidence reviews, cost-effectiveness analyses, risk assessments, and early operational/technical scoping. We are excited about the opportunity to deliver AI-enabled weather forecasting for smallholder farmers, and are now running deeper analysis on opportunities in global health.

The Role

The AI Access Initiative is at an early and critical juncture. We’re building a high-performing, globally distributed team from the ground up. We are hiring a People Operations Leader who can make this possible. In this role, you will have the opportunity to define and scale people operations for our team. This includes building lean systems to hire, onboard, and retain top talent to unlock meaningful upside for people in poverty globally. While incubated at Evidence Action, we plan to spin out in Q4 ‘26.

This role sits at the intersection of talent, performance, and organizational design. You will partner closely with the leadership team, act as a strategic thought partner and tactical operator on people decisions, and proactively look around corners on talent risk. You care deeply about the mission. You want to support the humans on this team including their growth, wellbeing, and ability to focus on work that matters, while building the systems and culture that make achieving our ambitious mission possible. You are excited to drive the engine behind the growth of a fast-scaling organization - growing by 20+ people in the coming year, and scaling meaningfully from there.

Level: We are open to considering exceptional candidates at the Senior Manager, As…