Artificial Intelligence Applications for Achieving SDG 4: Empirical Evidence from Azerbaijan’s Education Sector

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a key enabling technology for advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 3 (Good Health and Well Being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), and SDG 5 (Gender Equality) (1,2). Despite the growing global interest in AI driven educational and so-cial innovations, empirical evidence from developing and transition economy contexts remains limited. This study investigates the adoption, perceived effectiveness, and im-plementation challenges of AI applications contributing to SDGs 3, 4, and 5, with a specific focus on Azerbaijan’s education sector. A mixed methods research design was employed, combining a nationwide survey of 345 participants drawn from academic, research, and policy institutions with qualitative analysis of semi structured inter-views. The findings indicate a generally positive perception of AI enabled solutions, particularly in personalized learning systems, adaptive assessment, predictive healthcare analytics, and data driven gender equality monitoring mechanisms (3–6). However, respondents also identified substantial barriers to large scale and sustaina-ble implementation, including financial constraints, limited technical expertise, re-stricted access to high quality data, and ethical concerns such as algorithmic bias and lack of transparency (7–9). Qualitative insights further highlight institutional capacity gaps and governance challenges affecting scalability. Overall, the results suggest that while AI holds significant potential to accelerate progress toward SDG aligned out-comes, its transformative impact depends on sustained investment in data infrastruc-ture, AI literacy, ethical governance frameworks, and cross sector collaboration. Fu-ture research should prioritize longitudinal and comparative studies to support re-sponsible and scalable AI integration for sustainable development.