The place that inspired me to study medicine wasn’t a hospital—it was a church.

It was during a visit to see my uncle, a priest in a small, East Kenyan town called Modogashe. One day, I went to the parish to bring him his lunch and saw a nurse performing a suture on an elderly woman’s leg. I looked outside and saw a long line of patients, all waiting for their turn. His parish housed a small local clinic, staffed by a single nurse—the only medical practitioner in the area.

I turned to my uncle right then and told him I wanted to study medicine.

In rural communities like Modogashe—or Laikipia County, where I grew up—many patients don’t live anywhere near a clinic. Those who do often can’t afford regular visits, so they develop chronic, preventable diseases that cost even more to treat in the long term.

Clinicians, meanwhile, face overwhelming patient loads, compounding the stress of a job where a single mistake could cost someone their life. That’s why the clinic I’m at now, Penda Health, built a safety net.

It’s called AI Consult: a copilot embedded directly into the same digital records system we use for every appointment. As we enter information on the patient’s medical history, symptoms, test results, and our recommended treatments, the tool double checks our work. Most of the time, it shows a green check mark. But if we overlook a certain symptom or prescribe an inappropriate medication, it might return a yellow or red flag, prompting us to take another look.

I once had a mother bring in her four-month-old with a fever and runny nose. It looked like a simple cold or allergies, so I prescribed acetaminophen. But when I typed that in, a yellow flag from AI Consult popped up: the child’s respiratory and heart rates were elevated. That could just be the fever, but it could also be something else. So I listened to the child’s chest again—and this time, I heard something concerning.

I told the mother she should have her child screened for congenital heart disease. When I followed up a week later, she said their pediatrician had indeed found a congenital defect—a hole in the heart. If this hadn’t been caught, it could have been deadly. But with the right treatment, most children with these kinds of heart defects live healthy, normal lives.

Across all our clinics, we’ve seen a 16 percent drop in diagnostic errors and a 13 percent reduction in treatment errors since we started using AI Consult.

It’s still far from perfect. I have some concerns about newer clinicians over-relying on AI instead of developing their own clinical judgment. And I’ve occasionally noticed that certain information—like local drug formularies or protocols for pediatric care—is missing from the tool.

AI can’t replace health workers. I was the one who examined that baby. I was the one holding the stethoscope and talking to the mother. But when you’re the sole person responsible for someone’s health, a second opinion can save someone’s life.

No middle schooler wants to feel like they’re different from all the other kids. But I was. I was born and raised in Jamaica and moved to New York in seventh grade. Thankfully, I had a math teacher, Ms. Nolan, who never made me feel like an outsider. She even talked to the other kids to make sure I never sat by myself at lunch.

Today, I teach seventh grade math too. Many of my students are like me: immigrants from another country who might be enrolling in a U.S. school or learning English for the first time. But my classes are structured like any other.

When students walk in, there’s a warm-up problem on the board. Then we move on to a lesson, followed by independent or group practice. And we close with an “exit ticket”: one last question to see if they understood the lesson, which they hand to me on their way out. After class, I go through their exit tickets by hand to see who understood the concepts, and who’s struggling.

Like many teachers, my greatest challenge is differentiation. Because my classes are fairly large, I tend to adapt lessons for the students who are struggling, so I can make sure they catch up before we introduce a new concept. But that sometimes means I’m not doing enough to challenge the students who are already at or above grade level.

That’s where an AI tool, Kiddom Atlas, made a huge difference. Now, instead of giving everyone the same warm-ups and exit tickets, Kiddom tailors those problems to meet students where they are. If they’re struggling with a concept, it gives them more practice on it. If they’ve got it, it challenges them with something harder.

At the end of each day, it gives me summaries of each student’s progress, and can even show me precisely where there are gaps in their understanding. For instance, it showed me that one of my seventh graders was actually struggling because of a concept they misunderstood from the fourth grade. I don’t think I would have realized that by myself.

Before Kiddom, I was always skeptical about doing math on a computer. As teachers, we know that when students write things down by hand, they’re more likely to internalize the lessons and procedures. Even now, kids still spend most of my period with pencil and paper. But just using Kiddom for warm-ups and exit tickets—about 5 minutes of class time each—has made a huge difference.

I used to be known as the “bag lady” who always went home with a pile of ungraded papers sticking out of my bag. Now, the only thing in there is my laptop.

More important, my students are excelling. Over a single year, I’ve seen all of them rise to or above grade level. And though they don’t know it yet, by the time you read this, many of my once-struggling seventh graders will have started their eighth grade honors class.

There are still issues to work out. I wish my students could annotate questions on the computer the same way I teach them to on paper. And I sometimes catch flaws with the practice questions themselves. Kiddom has always been responsive when I raise these issues, while I can’t say the same for every platform.

AI can never replace a real teacher. It can’t make a classroom feel like a home, or make sure a new student doesn’t sit alone at lunch. But even though no middle schooler wants to feel different from everyone else, the truth is, they are. Every student has unique needs. And Kiddom Atlas has helped me support those needs better than I ever could have alone.

When I was a student, it was rare to see a textbook.

In the 1990s, when I was in secondary school, my country was in the middle of a civil war. Resources were scarce, and my education was constantly interrupted. Every once in a while, my classmates and I would see a rich kid walking around with a textbook, and we’d try to steal a few pages out of it so we could study too.

After the war, I studied masonry. But after working a few odd jobs, a local Catholic priest—Father Dominic—took a chance on me and asked me to teach construction to ex-combatants.

As it turned out, teaching was my calling. Today, I teach mathematics at a junior secondary school that not only has a library full of textbooks but a computer lab. I couldn’t be happier; my students have access to technology. So when I was invited to a workshop hosted by EducAid Africa about Gemini’s Guided Learning AI tool, I was excited about what it could mean for my class.

The impact was even greater than I imagined.

In Sierra Leone, people think of mathematics as something that only geniuses study. This belief has created a real problem for the entire country. After all, mathematics is a core subject for university and a foundational skill for countless professions.

I’ve been teaching mathematics for 20 years now, and usually, only around 55 to 60 percent of my students pass the class.

Since we started using AI to support our instruction, that number has gone up to 100 percent.

It’s not just my class. In a recent pilot program, students who used Guided Learning saw one to two years of educational progress in just eight weeks. Students—including mine—also reported enjoying math more, and I’ve seen them engage with the lessons more deeply.

The AI Guided Learning tool is fairly easy to use. Every day I write the topic of our lesson on the whiteboard. Students enter that topic, as well as their country and grade level, into the program, and it gives them guided practice questions. While they work on the questions, I make my rounds and check on anyone who seems to be struggling. Once they’re done, we leave the computer lab, head back to the classroom, and I continue teaching as usual. So what they don’t learn from Gemini, they learn from me—and vice-versa.

What really excites me are the applications beyond the classroom. If my students want to get more practice in, I tell them to borrow their parents’ phones—with supervision from their parents, of course—and use Gemini like a personal tutor.

There are still challenges when it comes to AI, of course. I worry about how kids might use these technologies without supervision. And a lot of my students don’t have internet access at home, so they couldn’t continue studying even if they wanted to.

But then I think back on my own childhood. Not only did I not have internet access, I often didn’t even have light. I remember studying outside by moonlight when I couldn’t find a lantern. I’m so excited about the opportunities my students have today; opportunities I could never have imagined as a student.

Farming is in my blood. I come from a family of farmers. I graduated university with a degree in agriculture, and my first venture after graduating, raising goats, was a success. I thought I knew everything. So I took my savings and started a poultry business. It was a disaster. I ran into one problem after another. And before I knew it, I’d lost thousands of chickens.

After that, I fell into a deep depression. It took a while to pull myself back out. But thankfully I wasn’t alone. I have a great team behind me. With their support, I started a new business: beekeeping. We began with just 30 bee boxes. Today, we have more than 1,000 boxes, and a team of 12 people. We sell to local businesses and individuals and even provide pollination services to other farmers—reducing their reliance on other regions for pollination.

I’ve learned a lot—both in the field, and in the classroom. But one of the biggest lessons is that you can only do so much alone. If you want to really grow, you need not only a good team, but access to the right information too. That’s why I was excited to learn about MahaVISTAAR during a regular training session with our local agricultural extension officer.

MahaVISTAAR isn’t the first AI tool or app I ever tried, but it is the first dedicated specifically to farming. It provides advice on crop prices, changing weather patterns, and pest control. But my favorite part might be the fertilizer calculator. All I have to do is put in what I’m growing and what kind of compost I’m using, and it tells me exactly how much fertilizer to use and when. That single feature has helped me reduce fertilizer usage by around 15 percent—savings that allowed me to start another new business growing mulberries, which I sell to local silk farmers.

Since the app was developed by the government, it understands numerous local languages and dialects. I can even use it to check what government support programs I’m eligible for, compare the selling prices of different crops, look up contact information for local agricultural officials, and so on. I probably use it to help me make decisions at least two or three times a day.

I’m one of the youngest farmers in my region. You might think that would be a disadvantage, but I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t build a business like this alone. You need a good team and the right tools. As long as you have both, there’s no failure you can’t overcome.