GoKawiilThe United Nations on Thursday announced that it is working with Google to make its vast collection of global statistics easier for AI systems to access and use.
Called the UN System Data Commons, the new system is built on Google’s open-source Data Commons platform and lets people search for statistics from across UN agencies using natural-language queries. It replaces the existing UNData portal, where users largely had to browse and search for statistics through a more traditional database interface. The new platform also supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows AI systems to connect directly to external data sources.
Users increasingly turn to AI tools for answers, but many systems still struggle to reliably surface authoritative data. A UNICEF benchmark of six large language models across more than 133,000 responses to questions about global development indicators produced an average accuracy score of just 21.2%, João Pedro Azevedo, the agency’s chief statistician, told reporters in a virtual briefing.
The test covered OpenAI’s GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Azevedo told TechCrunch.
About three in five responses did not provide a usable number at all, often because the models hedged their answers, Azevedo said. However, when the same questions were run again on the same model versions about two days later, models that provided a number both times returned the identical number only about half the time.
The study is a UNICEF working paper being prepared for journal submission and has not yet been peer-reviewed. The organization said it plans to release its methodology, code, and data alongside the paper.
UNICEF has also seen a sharp rise this year in traffic from generative AI assistants to its data website, which receives more than six million visits a month and is among the agency’s most popular websites. Visits from users clicking links in ChatGPT answers to the site rose 67% year over year between January 1 and September 14, Azevedo told TechCrunch. Such referrals accounted for 6.4% of all sessions this year, while UNICEF estimates that AI assistants overall now account for about one in 10 visits.
The UN said 26 of its entities have committed to the Data Commons, with data from nearly 20 available at launch. Moreover, it aims to bring 80% of the UN system’s statistical datasets onto the platform by 2027.
UN System Data Commons Image Credits:Google
“We are orders of magnitude more advanced in scale, scope, and flexibility, connecting for the first time across so many agencies across the UN system,” said Shantanu Mukherjee, acting director of the UN Statistics Division. “And [we are] taking this moment to also make our data AI-ready.”
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