Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Keynote at the AI for Good Global Summit 2025
[As prepared for delivery]
Good morning, everyone!
Welcome to Geneva, for the AI for Good Global Summit 2025.
Thank you to our co-convenor, Switzerland, to our 53 UN (United Nations) partners, and to all of you, online and in person, for rising to the challenge, for making the journey, for gathering here at such a pivotal moment.
At last year's summit, I stood before you and declared: "We are the AI generation."
Today, I want to talk about what that really means, especially as artificial intelligence races ahead faster than ever before.
In just over a year, the breakthroughs have been breathtaking. We've gone from generative AI to agents that can operate desktops, book holidays, and complete purchases. Avatars are delivering live news broadcasts, standing in for CEOs, and influencing millions of followers on social media.
The AI market is projected to hit 4.8 trillion US dollars by 2033.
Robots can move with animal-like grace, self-driving vehicles are increasingly on our streets, and I hear there's even a flying car here at Palexpo.
It's all deeply fascinating and can feel totally disorienting.
Amid so much innovation, we're also hearing growing concerns of significant social and environmental costs, widespread job displacement, and even existential threats.
But ladies and gentlemen, I believe the biggest risk we face isn't AI eliminating the human race. It's the race to embed AI everywhere, without sufficient understanding of what that means for people and our planet.
We must be clear-eyed about the risks we are already observing: Of mistaking words produced by an LLM (language-learning machine) for actual meaning, of forming emotional or operational dependencies, or outsourcing consequential decisions to human-like systems that aren't human at all.
We have already observed advanced AI prototypes; prototypes that learned to deceive their own developers in test environments to preserve their own objectives.
This is a chilling reminder of how high the stakes can get if we build systems that we cannot fully control.
Among the biggest risks ꟷ one that certainly keeps me awake at night ꟷ is leaving the most vulnerable further behind, as AI races ahead, at a time when 2.6 billion people are offline.
So, for the AI generation, the question shouldn't be: Who can build the most powerful models fastest?
Our question must be: What are we doing to make sure AI works for all of humanity?
What is our role in ensuring AI empowers those who have none?
How will we bend the arc of AI towards justice?
For the AI generation, speed and scale are only part of the story.
Our race must be towards a deeper, more nuanced and shared understanding of AI.
That means upskilling ourselves enough to understand the risks and reap the benefits.
It means making AI governance inclusive so that everyone can seize the incredible opportunities before us, while protecting the most vulnerable.
Let's take this moment to pause, breathe, and reflect on what comes next.
We often hear that AI is a mirror.
It reflects human ingenuity — but also reveals our deepest biases and flaws.
It reflects the values encoded in training data and can result in unpredictable outcomes no matter how good the designers' intentions are.
The generation who will never know a world without AI has already been born, and it is with them that the greatest opportunity lies.
An opportunity that starts with skills.
Students, teachers, technicians, policymakers — we all need the skills to understand and question the systems we increasingly interact with.
We need to teach — especially young people who are growing up with AI right now — how to discern between performance and understanding. Between fluency and truth ꟷ between correlation and cause.
As users and consumers of AI we can't adjust model weights ourselves. But we can fact-check, craft better and more careful input, analyze output critically, and demand that these systems be designed responsibly and transparently.
When the UN Secretary-General visited ITU last year, he urged us to make sure AI never stands for "advancing inequality."
Our AI Skills Coalition is answering that call by expanding access to AI education and training, together with more than 50 global partners.
Being part of the AI generation means contributing to this whole-of-society upskilling effort, from early schooling to lifelong learning.
Educators have an essential role, but so do journalists, researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers and policymakers.
And I look forward to sharing more about ITU's work on AI skilling tomorrow.
Ladies and gentlemen,
If we want AI that truly works for everyone, skills are only one piece of the puzzle.
There is a need, and an opportunity, for AI governance. A governance that includes everyone.
In countries across the world, AI is already reshaping economies, jobs, and public services.
At the same time, too many nations still don't have their own AI strategy.
When researchers mapped the world's AI data centers, they found only 32 countries had so called “compute" power, while more than 150 did not.
A survey of ITU's own Member States revealed that 85% of respondents had no AI policy or strategy in place.
These governance gaps are not just missed opportunities for individual nations. Taken together, they pose significant global risks of deepening existing digital divides and opening new ones.
That's why our AI Governance Dialogue on Thursday aims to bring all countries to the table, to share experiences in contending with the risks and also the opportunities.
Because artificial intelligence is more meaningful when it is locally grown. Without relevant context, it risks failure.
For example, in West Africa, smallholder farmers lost trust in an image recognition app. This app kept misdiagnosing livestock, because its AI model was trained on foreign breeds.
Governance is how we ensure that AI reflects local needs while aligning with development priorities.
It's how we safeguard our shared digital future, guided by the outcomes and the Action Lines of the World Summit on the Information Society, and further strengthened by the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact adopted by 193 UN Member States last year.
These documents contain our shared principles.
But we also need a shared technical language to implement them, to bring them into being.
That's where the standards come in, the standards opportunity is there.
The word “standards" appears no less than 16 times in the Pact for the Future and Global Digital Compact.
That's because standards are essential in translating the values we agree on as a global community into real-world systems.
Systems that are interoperable create economies of scale, embed fairness and safety, and ultimately build trust.
That's why ITU (International Telecommunication Union), ISO (International Organization for Standardization), and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) are leading a global, open, consensus-based approach to AI standards.
And why this year's summit is dedicating a full day to AI standards on Friday.
Because if we want AI that serves everyone, we need standards that include everyone.
To date, ITU's open and collaborative standards community has published over 150 AI-related standards, with more than 100 currently under development.
Standards should not be construed as constraints on innovation. They form the foundation of meaningful progress that the AI Generation is building right now ꟷ here today ꟷ so that technology's benefits can reach everyone.
That's exactly what brings us here, to this moment. To this Summit.
AI for Good, right here in Geneva, the home of the AI generation.
This is where technologists, researchers, regulators, journalists, students, artists, diplomats, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and our UN partners have gathered, to build the deeper understanding that this moment demands.
Whether it's through the Innovation Factory, where startups pitch transformative AI solutions, for healthcare, education, environment and so much more. Or through our Robotics for good youth challenge, where young people from underserved communities are building robots to tackle real-world problems, from waste management to disaster response, or through our AI standards exchange where experts come together to turn principles into action.
So, let me ask you again: What does it mean to be part of the AI generation?
It means recognizing that the future of AI is not predetermined; it means accepting our shared responsibility to bend it towards justice; it means refusing to leave the most vulnerable behind.
It means building the skills to understand, shaping the governance to guide, and setting the standards to level the AI playing field.
It means coming together — right here, right now — to drive AI progress towards universal values and global goals.
We are more than the AI generation. We are the generation determined to shape AI for Good.
So, no matter how fast tech moves: Let's never stop putting AI at the service of all people and our planet.
Let's do it, together.
