
Lukas Borkowski on Building Voice-First Humanitarian AI on a National Scale
From Humanitarian AI Today by Humanitarian AI Today
March 4, 2026 · 23 min
About this episode
Lukas Borkowski discusses the role of voice-first AI in serving offline populations in lower income countries.
Voices is a new mini-series from Humanitarian AI Today. In short daily flashpods, Voices passes the mic to guests to learn about new projects, events and advances in artificial intelligence and discuss topics that are important to the humanitarian community. In this flashpod, Lukas Borkowski, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Viamo shares how artificial intelligence can serve the billions of people who remain offline and rely on basic mobile phones. In a conversation with Humanitarian AI Today producer, Brent Phillips, Lukas spotlights the reality that most people in lower income countries live their lives largely offline and disconnected from the benefits of emerging AI applications while at the same time live under mobile network coverage. Lukas describes how Viamo works directly with mobile network operators to negotiate long-term partnerships that enable national-scale, toll‑free hotlines and behavior-change campaigns and he describes how Viamo is rapidly expanding voice-first gen‑AI experiences for use cases like rural health worker hotlines and disaster-preparedness campaigns. He outlines Viamo’s cloud and in‑country server architecture, their use of generative…
People in this episode
Host: Brent Phillips
Guest: Lukas Borkowski
Topics covered
- voice-first AI
- humanitarian technology
- mobile connectivity
- behavior-change communication
- public health
- generative AI
Keywords
- voice-first AI
- humanitarian
- mobile phones
- generative AI
- public health
- Viamo
- behavior-change
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Viamo, Humanitarian AI Today
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