UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents

The 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.