MELBOURNE, Australia. There is currently no binding United Nations convention protecting the rights of older people, unlike people with disabilities, who have had that protection under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities since 2008. Governments only began negotiating a comparable convention for older persons in Geneva in July 2026, following a UN Human Rights Council resolution in April 2025 to draft one. Into that gap, AI systems are already being built and deployed to support an ageing population.
On 25 September, Minikai CEO Keoki Alexander-Chang joined the United Nations session “Artificial Intelligence and Ageing: Inclusive Pathways for Older Persons in a Digital World” at UN Headquarters in New York, held as part of the Digital@UNGA 2026 Affiliate Programme. He contributed to Discussion 2: Inclusive Data and AI Development, addressing how organisations can better represent older people, particularly older women, throughout the AI development process, while that international rights framework is still being written.
Minikai has been deployed across residential aged care and in-home support services since 2024, in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, working with the documentation older people accumulate over years of contact with the care system: assessments, progress notes, incident reports and funding records. That experience has shown how easily a person's actual needs and history get lost between systems and years of paperwork, not through carelessness, but because no single record was ever built to hold the whole picture.
“It's quite profound to me that Australia's NDIS Act was written to give effect to a binding UN human rights convention, while the Aged Care Act draws on those same values without an equivalent convention to point to, because none exists yet for older persons. Now that Australia's care sector has built AI to uphold those values anyway, I think it's fair to ask the UN some questions back about what human rights should look like in a post-AI world,” said Alexander-Chang.
Keoki brought practical lessons to the discussion alongside the policy questions, specifically what the UN invited Minikai to speak to: reflections from deploying AI across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and what that experience shows about how AI systems can better reflect the needs, circumstances and lived experience of the people they are built to support. With the rights framework for older people still being negotiated, Minikai sees that kind of deployment evidence, what has worked, what hasn't, and what's been learned along the way, as exactly what should inform it.