Melissa Snow, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

“I’ve had the honor of being the first person to wrap a child in a warm blanket, or hand them a bottle of water and a change of clothes. These are small but important acts of kindness following the moment they were recovered from sex trafficking. When the chaos quiets and the reality of what they’ve endured comes crashing down, I’ve seen fear, exhaustion and the fragile hope that follows.

Those moments of hope are why I do this work. As the Executive Director of Child Sex Trafficking Programs at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), I’ve spent more than twenty years fighting for children by building systems, supporting recoveries, and helping survivors rebuild their lives.

Over those two decades, it’s been a privilege to see those same children grow up and thrive: raising families, running businesses, and complaining about everyday frustrations like their commute to work or a bad hair day.

But in all that time, there’s never been a year like this one.

Last year NCMEC received over 17,800 reports of child sex trafficking. After Congress required tech companies to report suspected child sex trafficking to NCMEC, reports to our CyberTipline skyrocketed over 900% in the first six months. Behind each and every report is a child who might be enduring unimaginable harm. At that scale, speed becomes survival. If the right information doesn’t reach law enforcement fast enough, they can’t move - and when they can’t move, children stay trapped in the nightmare they’re enduring.

That’s one reason we are using AI to clear the noise and connect the data that matters at a scale and speed that’s impossible for humans alone. For a child trapped in trafficking, every moment counts, and manual processes we’d developed could not keep up with the new volume. Now, our AI helps save children from child sex trafficking, plain and simple.

This isn’t technology for technology’s sake. AI amplifies our expertise. It gives us the ability to see patterns, act faster, and save children who can’t wait. It’s the evolution of decades of our hard-won experience - refined with survivors, data scientists, and subject matter experts to make the invisible visible.

We saw results immediately. In milliseconds, the AI model connected scattered and disconnected clues into patterns that made sense. We alerted law enforcement. And a child was found. For that child, all this meant one less day of being trafficked. One less day in fear. And one more chance at healing. This technology changed that child’s life - and ours.

AI buys us time to stop children from being sold. And in this work, every second counts.”