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What do you do when there are more learners than seats, and more people asking for guidance than a small team can answer? Six education organizations in the Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab used AI to close that gap in their own work, with people still making the decisions that matter.
A refugee woman in Greece is planning a career in tech around childcare and a new language. The organizations working with learners like her know what each person needs. Their limit was time, and AI is giving some of it back. Through the Lab, Lenovo and Tech To The Rescue offered grants, AI training and access to tech partners. Meet the six that have just graduated.
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Sistech supports refugee women build careers in tech. Every woman arrives with different skills, goals and responsibilities, so program managers used to build each learning plan by hand. That kept support personal, and it also capped Sistech at around 230 women a year while three times as many applied. Lena, Sistech’s AI learning navigator, works like a GPS for a tech career. A woman enters where she is, where she wants to go and what she has to plan around, and Lena maps a route of courses that fits her life. She decides if the plan works, and her program manager steps in when it doesn’t. In early testing, 79% of women said the plan reflected their personal constraints, and building a plan dropped from 26 minutes to 9. Sistech aims to reach 600 women a year by 2028.
“Sistech empowers refugee women with the tools and confidence they need to launch new careers in Europe. But we hit a ceiling in terms of the women we could support. The Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab helped us build the skills and foundations to create our own AI-powered tool, Lena, to push past that limit.”
Silvia Gallitto, CEO, Sistech
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STEAM for Vietnam had already reached tens of thousands of learners and had seen the limits of traditional courses. Every program had a fixed curriculum, a limited number of instructors and one path for everyone. In the Lab, the team tested different ways to bring AI into learning, and those tests grew into EduOne, a lifelong learning platform. A learner can find out what to study next, work through a hard concept, practice it, and ask the Vietnamese language AI Tutor a question at any hour. EduOne and the programs around it have reached 70,000+ learners in 34 provinces and cities, with 44,012 learning hours and 13,198 completed learning journeys. Students, teachers, journalism and communications professionals, healthcare professionals and small business professionals have all tested it.
“We entered the Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab with an idea: that AI could help us overcome some of the limits of traditional education at scale. The Grant gave us the seed resources to experiment, learn, and turn that idea into something real. We see this not as the finish line, but as the beginning of a much bigger vision for lifelong learning in Vietnam.”
Dr. Trần Việt Hùng, CEO & Founder, STEAM for Vietnam
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TakingITGlobal’s Connected North program connects students in remote Indigenous communities across Canada with interactive virtual learning, bringing them educators, experts and culturally relevant programming. As the catalogue grew, finding the right session took teachers considerable time and effort, with a wide range of subjects, grade levels and curriculum connections to weigh. Working with tech partner Kaalantak, Connected North built an AI session recommender. It considers grade level, subject, curriculum connections, cultural relevance and teacher preferences, and surfaces sessions teachers might otherwise overlook. The teacher still decides. The recommender can also help Connected North understand class interests and spot gaps in its programming. It has the potential to support 4,000+ teachers in 230+ partner schools.
“Every classroom is unique, and we want to make it easier for teachers to discover learning experiences that reflect their students’ interests, needs, and communities. Through the Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab, with support from Lenovo, Tech To The Rescue, and Kaalantak, we’ve been able to turn that vision into an AI-powered tool that helps educators find more relevant and engaging learning opportunities for their students.”
Michael Furdyk, Director of Innovation, TakingITGlobal
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Mereka runs employability, entrepreneurship and AI skills programs across Malaysia and Indonesia, screening thousands of applicants along the way. In the Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab, the team built Agent-E, an AI screening tool that links every score to evidence from the applicant’s own documents. The funding and expert hours that came with the Lab taught Mereka’s team of 30 to build and run its own systems. Mereka’s freelancer platform took years to build, and its new learning platform was built, customised, and migrated in months. Training modules that took weeks now take days, which leaves more time for mentoring participants. Mereka now teaches what it learned through Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab, a training offer that has reached around 500 people at small and medium enterprises, nonprofits and corporations in Malaysia and Indonesia.
“We used to buy our tools and hope they fit. AI changed that. It let a small team learn systems and build the things we actually needed. We own our systems, we know how they work, and nothing goes out without a human looking at it first.”
Miranda Prima Alifiana, Technology Strategy & Experimentation Manager, Mereka
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ReDI School of Digital Integration serves around 7,000 learners a year, and it started its AI work with its own team. During the Lab, staff formed a volunteer working group on AI safety and strategy, upskilling and deployment. They mapped AI skills across the organization and trained together on the EU AI Act, prompting and everyday AI use. That groundwork led to two launches. ReDI AI Workplace gives every staff member secure access to several AI models on a platform hosted in the EU. IMAI, ReDI’s pan European AI literacy initiative, trained 1,000 learners in its first three months and aims to reach 1 million by 2030.
“The participation in the Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab has equipped us with the tools, skills and resources that we needed to feel confident taking our first steps with AI. Through Lenovo and Tech To The Rescue’s support, we have built a strong foundation. Now, we are ReDI for the next step!”
Mireia Nadal Chiva, COO, ReDI School of Digital Integration
Since 2014, Laboratoria has helped more than 14,000 women across 11 countries build careers in the digital economy. Many of them are the first in their families to finish university and have work experience, but they have no network and no access to coaching. Through the Lab, Laboratoria first built an AI coaching co-pilot with tech partner DataSlush. Testing it showed that coaching worked best when women arrived with the groundwork already done, so the team moved AI earlier. On the Job Hub, a woman writes or records her achievements in her own words. The AI asks questions, points out weak answers and sends her back to redo them. She leaves with a Candidate Brief naming the two or three roles where she is most competitive, then works with an industry mentor and practices with real recruiters. Live since September 2026 in Spanish and Portuguese, the Job Hub will serve over 1,000 women a year. Across Laboratoria’s program, the share of women who believe their actions can change their outcomes rises from 25% to 70%.
“We joined the Lenovo AI for Social Impact Lab in 2025, just as the AI boom was taking off and we were rethinking our learning model for a labor market that AI is reshaping. Lenovo has supported our work across Latin America for years, so expanding that partnership together with Tech To The Rescue was an exciting opportunity to experiment when it mattered most. AI is our biggest opportunity yet to reach women at scale, and the time to make sure it serves those who need it most is now.”
Karen Kelly, Head of Partnerships & Fundraising, Laboratoria
The six graduates started in different places. Some built tools for the learners and job seekers they serve, and others began by preparing their own teams. Across all six, AI took on the repetitive work, and people kept the decisions that matter.
Tech To The Rescue and Lenovo are continuing their partnership. Organizations with an AI prototype or MVP ready to grow can apply to Tech To The Rescue’s AI Impact Scaling Program when applications open in early 2027.
To hear when applications open for the next programs, subscribe to The Impact Multiplier, Tech To The Rescue’s newsletter.
