The charity-focused AI platform, created by Enterprise Monkey, helps under-resourced NGOs and charities access AI-powered expertise – for free.
Founded by Geelong entrepreneur Aamir Qutub, the startup will travel to Switzerland in July to compete against innovators from around the world at the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit.
AI doesn’t always have the best reputation, with critics warning about everything from job losses to existential demise. But the AI for Good competition reminds us that technology can also be used for meaningful positive impact.
Led by the International Telecommunication Union in partnership with over 50 UN organisations, the initiative supports AI solutions to global challenges such as poverty, education, healthcare and climate change.
Its annual summit and Innovation Factory competition showcase startups using AI for positive social impact.
For Qutub, Enterprise Monkey being named the Australian winner of AI for Good Australia 2026 reflects a deep desire to make artificial intelligence more accessible and useful for the organisations that need it most.
“AI was supposed to do good in the world. Somewhere it lost that promise. Agents for Humanity is my attempt to bring it back,” Qutub says.
And bringing it back he is.
Agents for Humanity is a free platform that supports organisations and social enterprises to solve complex problems.
As Qutub explains: “There are roughly 10 million organisations on the planet trying to do good, and almost all of them hit the same three walls: no money for research, no best-practice handbook, and no connection to the people working on the same thing elsewhere.”
Agents for Humanity works to remove those barriers by not charging for access to teams of AI agents that can research problems, challenge assumptions and turn ideas into practical, usable plans.
How that happens using the platform is pretty simple:
After submitting real-world challenge, a team of AI agents is assigned specialist roles such as researcher, critic, verifier and synthesiser.
“Debating it out rather than spitting back one confident answer (when several models argue a problem through, you get far less of the made-up, biased stuff)”, Qutub says.
“What comes back isn’t just advice – it’s a living solution.”
“The quiet magic,” he says, lies in the platform’s shared memory, drawing on an ever-growing knowledge base.
“If someone in Kenya already cracked your problem, or there’s a curriculum model from the US that fits, the agents fetch it instead of starting from zero.”
Unlike many AI startups focused on commercial gain, Agents for Humanity aims to help the helpers.
“These organisations are full of heart and short on resources,” Qutub says. “Agents for Humanity gives them the research, the global best practice, and the implementation pack — the things big institutions take for granted — for free.”
For Qutub, the motivation for building the platform was deeply personal.
Growing up in a poor part of India, he saw first-hand how life changing community and social change initiatives can be.
His mother dedicated her life to teaching girls who could not afford to go to school so they could get an education and later a job. “Not in a classroom with a budget and a timetable, but in whatever way she could find. When she passed away from cancer, my father made it his mission to continue her work. He gave everything to it,” he says.
While Qutub went on to gain a formal education himself, graduating as a mechanical engineer and MBA student, he faced his own employment challenges when arriving in Australia.
“I applied for 300 jobs and got 300 rejections,” he says.
Eventually, he took work as a cleaner at Avalon Airport while continuing to pursue opportunities in technology.
That period became a turning point. He went on to found software company Enterprise Monkey before launching Agents for Humanity.
“The job titles changed a lot — engineer, cleaner, founder — but the constant was always the same: using technology to solve problems that actually matter,” he says.
As Geneva approaches 7-10 July, Qutub says his focus is on the big picture.
“The real goal is bigger than any one event: a world where doing good isn’t limited by who has the budget, the playbook, or the connections.”
When Enterprise Monkey won the AI for Good award in Perth, Qutub says the moment was heartening.
“When our name was announced, I closed my eyes. And I could see my mother, smiling at me — like she was really proud of what I’d done.”
He was also reminded of something she’d say …
“If you give someone a meal, you feed a family. But if you empower someone to take action, you uplift the whole community.”
In the right hands, it seems AI can absolutely be a force for good.
