What is Product Studio?
UNDP Product Studio is an in-house agency that designs and deploys scalable digital solutions across the UN system. This initiative helps the UN serve its mandates more effectively by leveraging cutting-edge technologies.
Studio's success so far
Our cost-saving digital products have supported areas like climate, gender equality, elections integrity and UNDP organizational performance.
40%
Reduction in price for iVerify deployments
24
Months of time saved by High Risk Project Criteria
90%
Reduction in procurement time
50k+
Reach of various products developed by the Studio
60+
Products deployed across a variety of units and thematic areas
1M$+
Projects in the pipeline
Studio can help you build
Web and Mobile Applications
Modern and highly performant web and mobile applications
Platforms
Advanced platforms that significantly improve business operations
Artificial Intelligence Tools
AI tools to automate human effort and streamline the creation of insights and action
Service Design
Service design combined with digital products for a holistic user experience
Search & Knowledge Bases
Easily find key information and organize knowledge across your team
Dashboards
Discover your data in new ways with easy to use real-time dashboards
How We Do It
Studio can help you turn an idea into a fully functioning digital product or solution to support your work. We provide end-to-end digital product and service development:
Ideation
Have an idea?
Feasibility
Can it be built?
Problem-solution fit
Is it the right
thing to build?
User research
What do
users want?
Interface design
How would
they use it?
Development
Get the best
to build it
Case Studies
From scattered signals to organized foresight
UNDP's horizon-scanning platform was outgrowing manual sorting. We added AI that tags and groups signals into themes, a chatbot to explore them, and visualizations that reveal patterns.
Gender equality assessments, in 100+ languages
Certifying institutions against the Gender Seal means reviewing mountains of evidence. LOLA assesses it against every benchmark and drafts the reports, and has grown into a full platform for Country Offices and reviewers.
Health product dossiers, screened with experts in control
Supplier submissions used to be checked by hand, with gaps chased over email. Our AI screener checks each dossier against the team's SOP and produces a report with clarification requests, showing its reasoning every time.
Future Signals: how we built it
Close ✕The challenge
As the number of signals grew, tagging and organizing them by hand couldn't keep up.
What we built
- Automatic tagging and a structured framework of themes and sub-themes
- An AI chatbot to explore and question the content
- Visualizations of signal sources, theme relationships, and content patterns
- Integrations with news feeds, an image library, and Mural for workshops
- Notifications, plus dedicated pages for projects and favorites
How we built it
We worked one feature at a time, so each piece could be tested with users before the next was started. First came the integrations and the AI models for tagging and the chatbot. Then the theme framework and its management interface. Last came the visualizations, notifications, and new pages.
LOLA: how we built it
Close ✕The challenge
Certifying institutions against the Gender Seal means reviewing large volumes of evidence, often in many languages, against detailed benchmarks.
What we built
- An AI pipeline that reads evidence documents and extracts the relevant information against each benchmark
- Draft review reports, improvement action plans, and suggested questions for assessors
- Outputs in 100+ languages
- A full platform where Country Offices submit evidence, assessors and quality assurance review it, and each role has its own dashboards and notifications, with UNDP login and interfaces in all UN languages
How we built it
LOLA grew in three phases. We began with the extraction pipeline and a prototype where the team could review and edit drafts. We then improved quality and reach, refining the prompts with the Seal team and adding multilingual outputs and automated reports. When the Seal adopted a revised framework, we opened the next phase with a workshop to map user journeys for every role and train the team in prompting, then built the full platform.
AI Health Product Screener: how we built it
Close ✕The challenge
Supplier submissions for health products arrived in mixed formats and were checked by hand, with gaps chased through repeated emails.
What we built
- Automatic ingestion and classification of PDFs, Word, Excel, and image files
- Completeness and compliance checks against the team's screening rules
- Structured screening reports with clear reasoning for every finding
- Automated clarification requests to suppliers, with all communication archived for traceability
- Integration with existing SharePoint workflows and UNDP single sign-on
How we built it
We designed the screener together with the QA specialists, shaping its logic and prompts with them and checking its results against their own manual reviews. Early workshops showed that it depended on other automation projects still in progress. Rather than wait, we built a separate testing interface and an AI agent that automatically tests and refines the prompts, so the screener kept improving on real dossiers. The solution is built to support human reviewers, not replace them, with training and a recorded walkthrough for handover.
Why work with Studio?
Human-centered approach
We understand the problem from those with lived experience and involve users throughout the solution's design, testing and adoption stages.
Sector savvy
We have a deep understanding of global development, building on UNDP's wealth of knowledge and country experience.
Future ready
We work with emerging technologies like Generative AI to make sure your digital solution is relevant and future-ready.
Featured Products
What clients say about Studio
If you want to accelerate your product development, solve the right problems, and create impact