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Client Case Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides medical humanitarian assistance to people affected by conflict, natural disasters, epidemics and exclusion from healthcare. Polpo spoke with Emma van Rotterdam, Advocacy Specialist at MSF, about political monitoring and how the AI Assistant helps her process large volumes of political information more quickly and free up more time for analysis.
About Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
Meet: Meet Emma van Rotterdam
Emma van Rotterdam is an Advocacy Specialist at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and is responsible for weekly political updates on relevant developments in The Hague and, where needed, Brussels. She brings together upcoming political agendas, parliamentary questions, debates and policy developments for the advocacy team, senior management and other colleagues across the organisation.
The topics are broad: from foreign trade and development cooperation to asylum and migration, humanitarian access and healthcare. Political decisions can affect people in need, their access to medical care and the ability of humanitarian organisations to work safely.
For MSF, advocacy starts from an important principle: independence and impartiality. Political conviction is not the starting point; what matters is what the organisation actually observes in humanitarian contexts.
“The humanitarian context is what guides us. We inform policymakers from the perspective of: this is what we have seen on the ground.”
The Challenge
The amount of political information that may be relevant to MSF is substantial. Emma needs to assess quickly which documents and debates matter, what the key message is and which developments require further attention.
AI makes political information accessible faster
Polpo helps Emma quickly determine which information deserves attention. Automatic summaries immediately highlight the key points and next steps from documents such as parliamentary letters and parliamentary questions. This means she does not have to read every document in full before deciding whether it is relevant. Emma also regularly uses the summaries as a basis for her weekly political briefing. The same complex political information can therefore be made accessible both to colleagues who work with politics every day and to senior managers and other colleagues who primarily need to understand the main points quickly.
- Automatic summaries of political documents
- Key points and next steps immediately visible
- Faster assessment of which documents require further analysis
- Support for weekly internal briefings
“It gives me the key points, the summary and the next steps straight away. That means I can quickly see: is this document ultimately relevant to me and my colleagues or not?”
From summarising to analysis with the AI Assistant
For Emma, the value of AI goes beyond summarising individual documents. She also uses the Polpo AI Assistant to explore connections between political positions and analyse major debates in a targeted way. For example, she can examine the common ground between parties on a particular issue. This helps her quickly understand how broad political support is and where parties may have more in common than initially expected. Commitments and next steps are important too. What direction was announced during a debate? What formal commitment was made? And what happened afterwards?
- Compare political positions and common ground
- Identify connections and trends faster
- Identify commitments and next steps
- Analyse specific topics within lengthy documents
- Ask follow-up questions based on the information found
“The AI Assistant really helps me make connections. I can identify trends much faster than if I had to do all of that myself.”
Better prepared for stakeholder meetings
The combination of political monitoring, search and AI also supports preparation for stakeholder meetings. When a colleague is due to meet a Member of Parliament, Emma can investigate exactly what that person has said about a particular topic in previous debates. Without Polpo, this would require manually searching through multiple debates and documents. Direct debate transcripts also help. Shortly after a debate, Emma can retrieve exactly what an MP said without having to watch the entire debate again or wait for an official transcript.
This makes it possible to anticipate developments sooner and respond more quickly.
“It saves so much time. As a result, you can anticipate much better, while also responding faster and more effectively.”
+ Polpo saves time
With Polpo, Emma works around 50% more efficiently
For Emma, the biggest benefit is time. Exactly how much varies from week to week and depends on what is happening politically. Her estimate, however, is that Polpo and the AI Assistant save her around half the time she would otherwise need to find, read, categorise and summarise the same volume of political information.
That time saving does not simply mean finishing tasks faster. Because less time is needed to process information, Emma has more room for the work where her own expertise adds the most value: making connections, examining important documents in greater depth and interpreting political nuance. “It saves such a large part of my time. That gives me the space to analyse, make connections and go deeper into documents that require attention.”
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What Makes Polpo Special
For Emma, time is the most important benefit. But that time enables a second advantage: greater depth. The AI Assistant can summarise documents, organise positions and make connections visible. The final political interpretation remains with the professional. That distinction matters. Political documents and answers to parliamentary questions are carefully worded. Sometimes the political meaning lies precisely in a particular choice of words, in what is not said, or in the room a minister leaves open through a specific formulation.
“Time really is the most important thing. And that creates room for depth. I can see more quickly what is relevant and where I want to dig deeper.”
Emma van Rotterdam
Advocacy Specialist
“What I like about this application at Doctors Without Borders is that AI isn’t trying to replace the political professional here. Instead, Polpo helps Emma work through the vast amount of information more quickly. This allows her to devote her time to interpreting political developments and the nuances that specifically require human expertise.”
Desmin Dekker
Co-founder Polpo