Cloudera and Mercy Corps Deploy Claude-Based Agentic AI for Humanitarian Work

Cloudera and humanitarian organization Mercy Corps announced on July 9, 2026 the next stage of their joint project applying artificial intelligence to relief work. The new tool, VERA (Verified Evidence & Research Assistant), is designed to automate tedious crisis analyses that previously took humanitarian teams several days to complete.

Mercy Corps is one of the world's larger humanitarian organizations, present in food crises, armed conflicts, and natural disasters across dozens of countries. Its collaboration with Cloudera began with the company's participation in the Tech To The Rescue program under the name AI for Changemakers, which produced their first joint tool, Methods Matcher. That tool was designed to summarize research and recommend proven crisis-response methods to experts.

What VERA does

VERA goes a step further than its predecessor. It's an agentic system that independently gathers information from scattered, diverse sources and then generates localized analyses tailored to a specific crisis. Rather than producing a single answer to a query, the system carries out a multi-step research process that previously required manual work by field analysts.

The system has been deployed for three specific use cases. In Sudan, it supports food security and agricultural situation analyses in a country mired in conflict and humanitarian crisis. In Colombia, it helps prepare reports on electoral process security. In Central and East Africa, it supports epidemic monitoring and crisis reporting.

The numbers behind the project

Cloudera cites concrete efficiency figures. Preparing an electoral security report in Colombia, which previously consumed significant team resources, now takes up to 90 percent less time. Situation analyses in Sudan, which used to require 5-6 days of work, have been cut to 2-3 days. The company also estimates specific financial savings: about $2,000 for each Colombian report and about $1,500 for each Sudanese report.

These time and cost savings matter in practical terms for organizations operating under pressure from limited budgets and a growing number of simultaneous crises. Cutting analysis time from a week to a few days means that decisions about aid allocation or threat warnings can reach field teams much faster.

Humanitarian organizations are being asked to do more with less, while responding to increasingly complex global crises - Jim Bisordi, SVP Professional Services, Cloudera

We see VERA as an important future tool for conducting research and secondary data reviews - Josh DeWald, VP of Technical Support, Evidence Quality and Programs, Mercy Corps

Anthropic in the background

The choice of Claude models as VERA's engine fits a broader trend of using Anthropic's systems in high-stakes projects where reliability and source verification matter. The tool's very name, Verified Evidence & Research Assistant, underscores that its creators emphasized the ability to trace where a given recommendation comes from, something with legal and operational significance in humanitarian work.

The project illustrates how agentic AI is spreading from the commercial sector into NGOs and aid organizations, which typically operate with far smaller technology budgets than corporations. The collaboration model, in which a cloud and AI infrastructure provider commits long-term rather than one-off support, could serve as a template for similar initiatives in Europe, including Poland, where aid organizations and local governments are only beginning to learn how to deploy such tools.

Cloudera says it plans to keep developing VERA and expand its use to further regions and crisis types. The results of the rollout will test whether agentic AI can genuinely speed up humanitarian crisis response, or whether it remains confined to a narrow set of analytical reports.