Ola Mohajer & Barney Afako, Mission Transend AI

Orchestrating Peace in Yemen: Revolutionizing Mediation with Agentic AI

Yemen’s conflict remains one of the world’s most complex and enduring crises. Years of war, fractured governance, and regional rivalries have created a deeply fragmented peace landscape where mediation efforts must contend with shifting alliances, humanitarian collapse, and waning international attention. Peacemakers are asked to do the impossible: track fast-changing dynamics, coordinate across multiple negotiation tracks, and design inclusive, adaptive processes all without the analytical or strategic tools available to their counterparts in defense or intelligence.

In this joint session, Barney Afako—a leading mediation expert with decades of experience in fragile transitions across Africa—and Ola Mohajer, Founder and CEO of Transcend, a pioneering company developing agentic AI for peace and strategic decision-making, come together to explore how technology can transform mediation practice. Drawing on Afako’s deep field experience and Mohajer’s work at the frontier of AI and diplomacy, the discussion will examine what mediators truly need to operate effectively in today’s conflicts.

Through an interactive case study on Yemen, they will introduce Transcend, the first agentic AI platform built specifically to support peacemakers, mediators, and conflict-focused institutions. The conversation will demonstrate how AI agents built for peace can help mediation teams map fragmentation, generate strategic options, and surface inclusive solutions—faster, and with greater clarity—while ensuring that technology augments, not replaces, human judgment in the pursuit of peace. By automating the analytical load, this approach enables mediators to redirect their time and energy toward the higher-order work of peace: building trust, shaping political will, and creating the space for genuine dialogue and agreement.