Instrument I
The Coordinated Capacity Survey
A measure of a cohort's readiness across six dimensions: knowledge, insights, attitudes, qualities, skills, abilities. Taken at the start and at each milestone.
A nonprofit institute for the discipline of AI Translation. Beginning in health.
The world will not lack AI.It will lack the capacity to use it well.
AI Translation (AIT) is the work of fitting frontier AI to the people, institutions, and constraints of a place. The fit changes with each place. The principles that guide it do not.
The Institute defines the discipline, measures a system's capacity to use AI well, and builds that capacity across a health ecosystem: the ministry of health, the institutions, the people who work in them, the entrepreneurs who serve them, and the communities they serve.
Country Partnership Forming in Fall 2026
Two bodies, one work
The Institute for AI Translation is a nonprofit devoted to the discipline of bringing AI into health systems in the right order: people and shared understanding first, tools second. Its findings are practiced in the field by doáb, a cooperative that launches locally owned centers, each a hub that builds a country's own capacity to apply AI well: in its health ecosystem, among its entrepreneurs, and in the people who come to learn. The Institute holds the knowledge; the cooperative holds the practice; the value stays where it is created.
Our vision
A world in which every community, whatever its resources, can take up the most capable tools of the age and bend them toward its own flourishing.
Why now
AI models are becoming cheap and alike. What separates one place from another now is whether its people and institutions can use them well.
1.7 points
The gap between the best open and closed AI models, down from 8 a year ago. The technology is no longer the scarce thing.
Stanford AI Index 2025
24% vs 0.7%
ChatGPT use among internet users in high-income vs. low-income countries. Where the need is greatest, use is lowest.
World Bank · April 2025
95%
of enterprise AI pilots return nothing. The researchers blame neither the models nor regulation. They blame the learning gap: people and institutions were not ready.
MIT Project NANDA 2025
23% vs 73%
Share of the public, and then of experts, who expect AI to improve their work. The gap is trust, and trust is built rather than bought.
Stanford AI Index 2026
AI is now abundant and cheap.The capacity to use it well is scarce, and slow to build. That is our work.
What we do
The Institute defines the discipline, measures capacity, and publishes what is learned.
Adoption asks how to get a tool in. Translation asks what a system must become to use it well, and keep using it well. Health ecosystems are not short of tools. They are short of the ability to absorb them. You cannot procure that. You have to grow it.
We begin where frontier AI is least likely to arrive on its own: public health ecosystems in countries the market will not reach first. Tools built elsewhere will not fit. The capacity to fit them must be built locally, and it is built in stages. Each stage gives a system the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and abilities the next stage requires.
This is a field of study: how people and institutions learn, how they change, and how the capacity to act together is built and measured.
AI Translation (AIT) is the discipline. Coordinated Capacity is what we measure as a system grows able to use AI well.
Instrument II
Example use cases
Seventy-five examples of where a ministry of health can start with AI, and what to leave for later. Free and open.
Instrument III
AI Concerns
A public map of what can go wrong with AI, how serious each concern is, and what to do next.
Study, through partners.
Technical skills and advanced health-ecosystem training through university partners, to be announced. Alongside these, a program of study in trust, hope, solidarity, and unity, so that people become agents of change in their own communities.
How we do it
Four steps. A stage is complete when people can do the work themselves.
01
Measure where you stand.
A cohort takes the Coordinated Capacity Survey and sees, in one shared set of numbers, where it stands across six dimensions.
02
Form a cohort.
Practitioners are developed together, never alone: first the capacity to consult and act as one body, then the capacity to use the technology well.
03
Work in cycles.
Act together, then look again. Quarterly cycles of study, consultation, action, and reflection, on real problems in the cohort's own community.
04
Return what was learned.
What the field learns is written down and sent back to the Institute, so the next cohort begins further along.
Trust is not given. It emerges over time, when actions are consistent with words. We build trustworthiness one completed cycle at a time, until people believe that institutions mean what they say.
The Institute names the discipline, measures capacity, and publishes what is learned. doáb launches and accompanies the centers that practice it.
The Institute holds the knowledge. doáb, the cooperative, holds the practice. The value stays where it is created.
Where we work
We work in countries where the whole health ecosystem is ready to move together. Five kinds of participants must be at the table: the government, the business community and health systems, the entrepreneurs, the universities, and the local investors and supporters who will carry the work forward. Each contributes; none is asked to stand alone.
We also work only where we already have deep relationships and trusted people on the ground through our prior work. Arriving as strangers is not a path we take.
Our way of proceeding is the same everywhere. We begin by assessing receptivity and building a shared vision with those five participants. From a unity of vision comes a unity of understanding, as the ecosystem learns to read its own reality and agree on what matters most. From a unity of understanding comes a unity of action, as the center is launched and the work of building local capacity begins. Each step earns the next.
Who is behind this
A surgeon who left the operating room to work on the gap between what technology can do and what institutions can absorb.
The Institute was founded by Salim Afshar, MD, FACS, formerly a surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He founded Surgathons in India and Rwanda, founded Reveal HealthTech, and is a serial entrepreneur.
Alison Bird, Chief of Staff, spent nearly two decades in international development and diplomacy and has directed more than $1.3 billion in multi-year programme investments across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Guided by Advisory Councils, the first three convening in 2026: Academic, Technology, and Capital & Financing.
Country Partnership Forming in Fall 2026
Who this is for
This is for the people who lead health ecosystems, the people who work in them, and the people who stand behind them.
If you lead
Ministers of health, health-system CEOs, hospital directors, pharma CEOs, university leaders, and local investors.
Write to learn moreIf you do the work
Doctors, nurses, engineers, civil servants, program leads, and faculty.
Join a cohortIf you build
Entrepreneurs and founders who want to serve their own health ecosystem and community.
Join a cohortIf you back the work
A university. A foundation. A lab. A company. You may teach this, fund this, or host it. Grants open a country; local funds keep the work there. A person reads every note.
The cooperative
The discipline is carried into communities by doáb, a cooperative.
doáb launches locally owned centers. Each is a hub that builds a country's own capacity in three directions: it brings the AI Translation methodology into the health ecosystem, it accompanies entrepreneurs as they build ventures that serve that ecosystem and the wider community, and it walks with individuals and cohorts through training and certification. A center may deliver services itself where that is the fastest path to proof, but its measure is the capacity it leaves behind.
We do not deliver transformation. We form the people who carry it. Why a cooperative? Because the structures in common use reward the vendor, the consultant, or the funder before they reward the community. A cooperative aligns the incentives: members keep what they build, power stays local, and authority arises from voluntary participation rather than from the outside.
The capacity of people to serve their own communities is not a hope we hold. It is the principle we build on.
A serious crisis involving AI will come.What will matter then is whether communities have already learned to act together.