Jane Goodall: AI and AWS Save Her Crucial Research

The Jane Goodall Institute and the Preservation of Chimpanzee Data

The Jane Goodall Institute holds an invaluable wealth of over 500,000 pages of handwritten research on chimpanzees. To digitize this data, the institute has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create the Gombe AI Research Platform. This tool aims to increase access to the data and provide multimedia analysis to support research efforts on a global scale.

Primatologist Jane Goodall, accompanied by a team of researchers, has spent over six decades quietly observing chimpanzees in East Africa using binoculars. Field researchers take handwritten notes every 15 minutes while observing a single chimpanzee, and every minute when observing mothers and their infants. These notes, written in several languages including English and Swahili, must then be digitized. This manual process can take up to two days to enter all field data into web-based systems, according to Lilian Pintea, Vice President of Conservation Science at the Jane Goodall Institute. He added that the organization had accumulated a backlog of several years of data waiting to be uploaded since the creation of its first digital database in 1997.

In 2025, Pintea began using advanced language models to accelerate the digitization of these handwritten notes, making scientific data more accessible for researchers at the nonprofit organization founded by Goodall in 1977. Following the death of the renowned conservationist in October 2025, preserving her legacy by digitizing her handwritten notes became a priority, Pintea told Business Insider. "AI is just a continuation of our long history of different technological cycles," he stated.

Technological Challenges

One of the biggest challenges the Jane Goodall Institute faces is the storage of an abundance of disparate data covering five generations of chimpanzees, Pintea said. University researchers visiting Gombe store their findings — in the form of physical notes, photographs, and audio and visual files — in the databases of their own institutions.

A new data tool that the Jane Goodall Institute continues to develop with Amazon Web Services — called the Gombe AI Research Platform — aims to store this data in a single, more accessible location, which, according to Pintea, will facilitate collaboration among researchers. A team of nine lead researchers, each supported by two to three doctoral students, and about half a dozen undergraduate students, has helped the Jane Goodall Institute digitize these assets.

It all began in March 2025 when Goodall delivered a speech at the AWS Imagine Conference in Washington. It was there that Pintea was invited to explore a potential collaboration between the nonprofit organization and AWS's cloud computing platform. During a kickoff meeting for the collaboration in April 2025, Pintea stated that the Jane Goodall Institute wanted to use AI to identify the use of medicinal plants in video sequences and classify the plants that the monkeys were eating. This use case was deemed too rare to pursue.

By June 2025, AWS and the Jane Goodall Institute had pivoted to a different idea, one that was more broadly useful for AWS's AI: analyzing photo and video recordings. Taimur Rashid, General Manager of the Generative AI Innovation Center at AWS, stated that the two organizations decided to build on an existing video search tool called WISE, developed by the University of Oxford in January 2023. He explained that AWS had used WISE's conceptual framework to develop a cloud-based tool for visual search and computer vision models to analyze chimpanzee footage, so researchers would not have to spend hours manually reviewing videos.

"We can take all these years of analog data, digitize it, make it searchable, and add generative AI elements to examine these data points and really understand all these years of data," Rashid told Business Insider.

In August 2025, an AWS team followed Pintea and field researchers into Gombe National Park to better understand their fieldwork. It was at this point that the team reported a breakthrough: the tool could also be used for digitizing handwritten records. The Jane Goodall Institute and AWS stated that 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 data tool and platform builder Ode PB held a kickoff meeting for the transition to the new system, called the Gombe AI Research Platform. Throughout early 2026, teams worked to define the platform's requirements and the researchers' workflows where AI could be beneficial.

Future Perspectives

Pintea stated that he expects AI to finally help the organization catch up on 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, lead researchers, doctoral students, and undergraduates beyond the Jane Goodall Institute.

In Kibale National Park in Uganda, two groups of chimpanzees clashed during the second recorded civil war among the species. Pintea noted that the institute's AI efforts make real-time field data more easily accessible to researchers studying this phenomenon, which was first recorded at Gombe.

"This is about understanding our closest living relative as a means of understanding human evolution and defining ourselves," Pintea said.