John Zoltner – AI Child Safety &
Tech for Social Impact

For most of my career, that meant adapting technology tools – or ways of using tools – for people who rarely have access to them, such as low-income communities in the United States, rural smallholder farmers in Latin America, and fishermen, herders, and community health workers across sub-Saharan Africa. That work taught me two things that shape everything I do now.

First, safety is not an add-on to development. It is the pre-condition necessary for development to take place. The tool that lifts a person, family or community can also harm it.

Second, no matter the intent of its creators, once a tool escapes the labs, what can go wrong, will go wrong: that's true when tools built in the North fail under conditions in the Global South never imagined by their engineers, and when users take advantage of well-intended features to harm others.

When I founded AIChildSafety.org – I did so because I knew that artificial intelligence raises the stakes enormously. While AI can help children learn, create, and think for themselves like no tool that came before, if designed carelessly, it can severely weaken those abilities. AI can solve some of the world's most complex problems, or can create new ones. It can free individuals to participate actively in a healthier society, or concentrate power into just a few hands.

I am not willing to leave that to chance.

I don't work based on opinions. Through our Childhood and AI Lab Research Fellowship, 66 researchers across 23 countries are building the evidence for keeping children safe and helping them thrive in the AI era. That evidence is the foundation for everything else, including the standards we propose, the companies we advise, and the design principles we advocate for.

The development work didn't end when I turned to child safety; it changed shape. In 2025 I also founded AI4SocialImpact, an advisory practice for the organizations I've spent my career alongside – nonprofits and NGOs that are being told to adopt AI but rarely funded to do it. We help them win the funding, then do the work it pays for: strategy, governance, and integration, in English and Spanish, from the United States and Santiago, Chile.

Whether I'm partnering with civil society, researchers, technologists, governments, or funders, I'm always moving toward the same goal: AI built with and for the people it affects, and children growing up able to think critically and shape the world around them, rather than consuming what it hands them.

With great technology, comes great responsibility. Let's take on that responsibility together.