UN Taps Google to Make Global Statistics AI-Ready
The United Nations is working with Google to make its vast collection of global statistics easier for AI systems to access and use. The new system, called the UN System Data Commons, is built on Google's open source Data Commons platform and allows users to search for statistics from across UN agencies using natural-language queries.
This replaces the existing UNData portal, where users had to browse and search for statistics through a more traditional database interface.
The new platform supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows AI systems to connect directly to external data sources. This is particularly important as more people rely on AI tools to find and interpret information.
According to a UNICEF benchmark, large language models struggle to reliably surface authoritative data, with an average accuracy score of just 21.2% across six major models.