Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Special address to the opening plenary of the
29th session of the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development (CSTD)
at the Assembly Hall, Palais des Nations
[As prepared for delivery]
Distinguished Chair,
Excellencies, colleagues, friends,
It is a pleasure to be with you again at this Commission.
Last year, our conversation was about reflection — twenty years of WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society), a moment to take stock.
In December, Member States adopted the WSIS+20 Outcome Document.
They reaffirmed the vision first shaped in Geneva and Tunis — a people-centered, inclusive, development-oriented information society — and extended our mandate to deliver it by 2035.
Six billion people are now connected: The best single measure of the WSIS promise at work.
And yet one in four is still completely offline — with new digital divides widening as AI advances.
That is why "Science, Technology and Innovation in the Age of AI" is exactly the right theme at the right moment.
AI is reshaping economies, public services, and how we learn and work — faster than any technology before it, including the Internet itself.
The question is whether that transformation becomes an engine of growth for all people, everywhere, or whether AI's benefits are reserved for the best-resourced.
And WSIS can help us answer it, because it was never only about infrastructure or access.
The WSIS principles and Action Lines are based on human-centered, multistakeholder digital cooperation.
That's exactly what we need as we shape governance for technologies we are still only just beginning to understand.
In practical terms, I believe the answer comes down to closing three gaps: infrastructure, investment, and capacity.
Starting with infrastructure.
Not one of the world's top 100 high-performance computing clusters sits in a developing country.
Only 33 countries have inference-grade AI compute within their borders, and just 24 have training-grade compute — roughly twelve per cent of United Nations (UN) Member States.
The Global South is home to half the world's Internet users but holds less than ten per cent of global data centre capacity.
A single country hosts ten times more data centres than any other, and a single company makes almost every leading AI chip.
Left unaddressed, this is a Second Great Divergence — widening the gap between countries shaping artificial intelligence (AI), and those merely consuming it.
The second gap is investment.
Development finance is under extraordinary pressure.
Many Member States — and UN agencies — face near-impossible choices about where to allocate dwindling resources.
And yet the AI market is projected to reach 4.8 trillion dollars by 2033 — roughly the size of the world's third-largest economy.
But that capital is not flowing where it is most needed.
Developing countries are almost entirely absent from the top tier of AI investment.
This is why, at the Financing for Development Conference in Seville, ITU and UNCTAD (UN Trade and Development) jointly launched the Digital Infrastructure Investment Catalyzer — a mechanism to mobilize collective financing and help close the gap.
The WSIS+20 Outcome Document asks UNGIS (UN Group on the Information Society) to build on this effort by strengthening how we finance digital development together, drawing on best practices of multilateral institutions, development partners, and the private sector.
As UNGIS Secretariat, ITU looks forward to reporting on our progress to the 30th CSTD next year.
The third gap is capacity.
Without it, infrastructure sits idle and investment in digital cannot generate returns.
And yet, generative AI adoption in the Global North is growing nearly twice as fast as in the Global South.
About half of the world's top AI researchers come from a single country.
These disparities will not fix themselves.
They require deliberate capacity building — in schools, universities, research, and innovation ecosystems that turn ideas into opportunity and skills into AI agency.
Colleagues,
Infrastructure, investment, and capacity are three gaps no country and no organization can close alone.
Which is why the international community is working to advance science, technology and innovation in the age of AI together.
Last year, the General Assembly established the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance.
ITU is proud to serve on the Joint Secretariat with UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the Office of the Tech Envoy.
This morning at ITU Headquarters we had the pleasure of welcoming the Dialogue Co-Chairs together with the UN community in Geneva.
On Wednesday the first physical meeting of the independent panel will take place in Madrid and I look forward to meeting the members.
We are delighted that the inaugural Global Dialogue will be back-to-back with the AI for Good Global Summit, and the WSIS Forum, converging up the road at Palexpo.
It will be an unparalleled platform for the international community to shape a digital future that is safe, inclusive, and sustainable for all.
Ladies and gentlemen,
WSIS is not something we leave behind after twenty years of digital development progress.
We must carry its principles forward — and apply them in new contexts.
As technology races ahead, governance can feel stuck at the starting line.
But AI does not get to decide how this race goes.
Humanity does.
And ITU's 161 years of experience tells us this is a marathon, not a sprint.
So let us keep collaborating — through this Commission, the UN system, and across every economic sector — to close these gaps and every digital divide, with people at the centre of everything we do.
That's how we shape AI into what it should be: An engine that accelerates inclusive, sustainable development for everyone, everywhere.
