When the Ground Shakes, Human-Centred AI Holds Steady
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Global Direction Awards Names Three Winners of the 2026 Human-Centred AI Award
August has been a month of tremors, literal and otherwise. Typhoons, floods, and heatwaves have battered communities across Asia and beyond, while shifting political currents in the United States, Japan, China, and Taiwan have rattled markets and unsettled households worldwide. Stock exchanges have wobbled on every fresh headline, a visible symptom of a less visible anxiety: people no longer feel certain the ground beneath them, economic, environmental, or political, will hold.
Against this backdrop, Global Direction Awards (GDA) is proud to announce the winners of the 2026 Human-Centered AI Award, honoring projects that prove artificial intelligence can be a source of stability rather than disruption, a tool that restores agency to people, not one that replaces them.
"In a year defined by disasters and disruption, we looked for AI that steadies human hands instead of pushing them aside," said the GDA judging panel. "Each of this year's winners answers a different kind of instability, energy insecurity, broken communication, and bureaucratic distance, with the same quiet principle: technology should serve understanding before it serves speed."
Community-Based AI Energy Audit System and Service, Industrial Technology Research Institute (Taiwan), led by Ju-Min Liao, Yu-Chen Lin and Hsiao-Yun Huang, turns household energy audits into a fast, visualised, elder-friendly service, cutting audit time from three working days to under ten minutes. The judges called it
"a model for how AI can protect vulnerable communities from rising energy costs and climate strain without leaving anyone behind in the digital transition."
BISI — Before I Say It, Common Sense Lab (Dublin, Ireland), created by Niamh O'Connell and Maeve Kavanagh, helps people prepare for difficult conversations rather than avoid or escalate them. The judges praised its restraint:
"BISI succeeds when it says nothing at all. At a moment when so much AI competes to speak for us, this project chooses instead to help us speak for ourselves — a genuinely human answer to a noisy year."
The Better Way, Vilnius Institute for Human Systems (Lithuania), developed by Rūta Kazlauskaitė, Mantas Vaitkus and Tomas Jankauskas, reimagines public administration around citizens' underlying needs rather than rigid applications.
"It transforms rejection into guidance," the panel noted. "In times of institutional distrust, this is exactly the kind of AI that can rebuild confidence between citizens and the systems meant to serve them."
Taken together, this year's winners reflect GDA's founding conviction: that in a year of shaking ground, artificial intelligence built around human needs, not around efficiency alone, is what will ultimately underwrite shared economic and social resilience. Human-centred design, the judges concluded, is not a constraint on AI's potential; it is the condition for it to be trusted at all.
The full list of 2026 Global Direction Awards winners is available at: https://www.gda-awards.com/winners
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