Design With, Not For: What Changes When Young People Shape an AI Coach Early
The ILO's Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026, published August 11, counted one in five young people in the world, 257 million, not in work, school or training. Most of them live in low- and middle-income countries, and the ILO estimates that 1 in 4 jobs worldwide is potentially exposed to generative AI. GOYN works on one rule: design with young people, not for them. Across 20 communities in 10 countries, that means young people sitting in the rooms where decisions about their economic future get made. This session asks what that rule demands when the thing being designed is an AI tool, and whether anyone is actually doing it.
Most of the effort so far has gone to access, which is needed and not enough. A young person who has never been asked what she thinks will take what the machine tells her, and these systems are trained to agree. Learning to question them takes a person who asks about her real situation and does not settle for her first answer, week after week. That is coaching, and for most people it has been too costly or out of reach.
GOYN and Besage.ai are working with nine Youth Ambassadors across seven countries to shape an applied-AI coaching platform to support Opportunity Youth pursuing dignified livelihoods, economic opportunities and leadership pathways. The Ambassadors chose the skills it coaches on and are identifying ways it can be more responsive to their needs and lived realities–including how to truly reach them. We will draw on their experience and on Besage’s earlier pilots with returning migrants in six municipalities in Nepal and with Venezuelan refugees in Lima, and work through what is working, what is not yet, and what it would take for an applied-AI coach to serve Opportunity Youth globally, at scale.
What we will explore
What does a 22-year-old in Mexico City need to hold her own with a machine built to agree with her?
Where does the gap widen: access, judgment, institutions, or hiring? Which of those can anyone in this room move?
Five years from now, AI has made things worse for young people in low-income countries. What did we get wrong, and what would asking them earlier have caught?
What to expect
A general-purpose model and a coach young people helped shape, given the same question, with the transcripts side by side.
Tania Gayosso, a GOYN Youth Ambassador from Mexico City, on taking a real workplace conflict to an AI coach, and on what it asked her that she had not asked herself.
A one-page scorecard for judging any AI tool built for young people, yours to keep.
Who should come
Anyone responsible for young people's path into work, whether you run programs, fund them, set policy or build the models. If you have been asked whether AI is ready for the people you serve and do not yet know how to answer, come.
Speakers
Zeina Shuhaibar, Deputy Director, Global Opportunity Youth Network, Aspen Institute
Joel Miranda, Senior Manager for Opportunity Youth Leadership & Partnership, Global Opportunity Youth Network, Aspen Institute
Elizabeth Gozzer, Co-Founder and CEO, Besage.ai
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