Primatologist Jane Goodall and a team of researchers have spent more than six decades quietly observing chimpanzees in East Africa with binoculars.
The field researchers take handwritten notes every 15 minutes when observing a single chimpanzee, and every minute when observing mothers and infants. Then, they must digitize their notes, which come in multiple languages, including English and Swahili. It typically takes up to two days to manually enter all field data into web-based systems, said Lilian Pintea, the vice president of conservation science at the Jane Goodall Institute. He added that the organization has operated with a multi-year backlog of data awaiting upload since it created its first digital database in 1997.
In 2025, Pintea said he began using large language models to accelerate the digitization of more than 500,000 pages of handwritten notes, which makes scientific data more searchable for researchers at the nonprofit Goodall founded in 1977. Following the famed conservationist’s passing in October 2025, preserving her legacy by digitizing her handwritten notes has also become a priority, Pintea told Business Insider.
“AI is just a continuation of our long history of different technology cycles,” Pintea told Business Insider.
The tech
One of the biggest challenges the Jane Goodall Institute faces is storing an abundance of disparate data spanning five generations of chimpanzees, said Pintea. University researchers who visit Gombe store their findings — in the form of physical notes, photographs, and audio and visual files — in their own institutions’ databases.
A new data tool that the Jane Goodall Institute continues to build with Amazon Web Services — called the Gombe AI Research Platform — aims to store this data in a single, more accessible place, which Pintea said will make it easier for researchers to collaborate. A team of nine principal investigators, each supported by two to three Ph.D students, and roughly half a dozen undergraduate students, has helped the Jane Goodall Institute digitize these assets.
It all began in March 2025, when Goodall delivered a keynote at the AWS Imagine Conference in Washington. It was there that Pintea was first asked to explore a potential collaboration between the nonprofit and AWS’s cloud computing platform, he said. During a kickoff meeting for the collaboration in April 2025, Pintea said the Jane Goodall Institute wanted to use AI to identify medicinal plant use in video footage and classify which plants the apes were eating. The use case was deemed too rare to pursue further.
By June 2025, AWS and the Jane Goodall Institute had pivoted to a different, more widely helpful idea for AWS’s AI: photo and video record analysis. Taimur Rashid, the managing director of the Generative AI Innovation Center at AWS, said the two organizations opted to build on an existing video search tool called WISE, developed by the University of Oxford in January 2023. He said that AWS used WISE’s conceptual framework to develop a cloud-based tool for visual search and computer vision models to analyze chimpanzee footage, so researchers wouldn’t have to spend hours manually screening the videos.
“We can take all of these years of analog data, digitize it, make it searchable, and add elements of gen AI to look at these data points and really comprehend all these years of data,” Rashid told Business Insider.
In August 2025, a team from AWS followed Pintea and field researchers in Gombe National Park to better understand how they work in the field. It was at this moment that the team said it had a breakthrough: the tool could also be used for the digitization of handwritten records. The Jane Goodall Institute and AWS said the AI platform could be used for five tasks: multimedia search, video scene detection, chimpanzee facial recognition, AI-powered behavioral analysis, and automated data processing and translation.
By December 2025, AWS, the Jane Goodall Institute, and AI tool and data platform builder Ode PB held a kickoff meeting to transition the new system, called the Gombe AI Research Platform. Throughout early 2026, the teams worked to map out platform requirements and researcher workflows where AI could be helpful.
Some of the institute’s researchers are already experimenting with the Gombe AI Research Platform, and the tool is expected to be fully live by the fourth quarter of 2026, said Rashid. The teams are still developing a few elements, like a specialized dictionary derived from 65 years of field notes and the ability to understand a Gombe-specific dialect of Swahili.
The outcome
Pintea said that he expects the AI to help the organization finally catch up with its six-year backlog of data that has yet to be digitized. He added that he hopes the Gombe AI Research Platform will be used by field researchers, principal investigators, Ph.D. students, and undergraduates beyond the Jane Goodall Institute.
In Uganda’s Kibale National Park, two groups of chimpanzees have been fighting in the second-ever recorded civil war among the species. Pintea said the institute’s AI efforts are making real-time field data more readily accessible to researchers studying the phenomenon, which was first recorded in Gombe.
“It’s about understanding our closest living relative, as a way to understand human evolution and define ourselves,” said Pintea.
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