From collecting millions of online supermarket prices to measure inflation, to assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-income workers, digital data sets can be used to benefit the public interest. Using these and other examples, this special report explores how digital data sets and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) can provide timely, transparent and detailed insights into global challenges. These experiments illustrate how governments and civil society analysts can reuse digital data to spot emerging problems, analyze specific group impacts, complement traditional metrics or verify data that may be manipulated. But AI and data governance should extend beyond addressing harms. International institutions and governments need to actively steward digital data and AI tools to support a step change in our understanding of society’s biggest challenges.
