AI for Good, in Practice: The Story Behind Podus AI

Every few months a new phrase arrives for technology built to do something other than make money. Tech for good. AI for good. We use both, and we are wary of both, because the phrase is easy and the working product is not.

Podus AI is our answer to the phrase. It is a free AI legal assistant built by Citizens’ Gavel, trained on Nigerian law and reachable over WhatsApp. It exists because of years of unglamorous work that came before it.

What “AI for good” means to us

It means starting from who is being left out. In Nigeria, needing a lawyer and being able to afford one are two different things, and the gap falls hardest on people facing exactly the moments the law is supposed to cover: a wrongful arrest, an illegal eviction, a demand for a bribe.

So we did not build a general assistant with a social-impact page bolted on. We built one deliberately tuned to move fastest on the cases where delay costs a person their freedom:

• Police extortion and brutality
• Illegal arrest and detention
• Fundamental human-rights violations
• Gender-based violence and abuse

And we made it end in something usable. Podus AI drafts the petitions, complaint letters and Freedom of Information requests that go to the bodies which can actually act: the National Human Rights Commission, the Public Complaints Commission, the FCCPC, state mediation centres. Advice is where most legal chatbots stop. A document an institution has to answer is where a case starts.

The years before the AI

Citizens’ Gavel was founded in 2017 to make justice more accessible in Nigeria, long before any of this could be automated. We built a network of volunteer lawyers and the tools to support their casework. During the 2020 #EndSARS protests that network grew to 250 lawyers and handled more than 400 intervention cases for people who had been arrested and detained. In 2021 we launched Justice Clock, a case-file tracking system for the courts.

Podus AI, launched in 2024, is the AI-native step in that same line of work. It did not replace the lawyers. It sits on top of the network they built, and it is how far more people now reach them.

Good is measured in cases, not claims

The honest test of a tech for good project is whether the team behind it can tell you how many people it served. More than 33,000 people have used Podus AI since launch, and Citizens’ Gavel has handled over 6,500 legal interventions since 2017. Those are not impressive numbers by consumer-technology standards. We report them anyway, because each one is a person who got further than they would have alone.

Where we go next

Podus AI already draws on Nigerian, Ghanaian and UK law, and we are working toward wider coverage across the continent. Around it sits the rest of the Podus ecosystem: contract analysis, background checks, and Podus Multidoor for filing disputes into multi-door courthouses. Together they let a matter travel from a first question to a resolved case without leaving one place.

That is the whole ambition, and it is a modest one: not AI that impresses, but AI that gets an ordinary person heard. Try it at chat.podus.ai.