Page 89 - The Annual AI Governance Report 2025 Steering the Future of AI

The Annual AI Governance Report 2025: Steering the Future of AI

deliver in specific areas, from deepfakes to access to compute power to red teaming, always
grounded in scientific observation.

One government representative at the Dialogue requested support from peers around the
table. It’s a powerful reminder that when we bring the right people together, dialogue goes
beyond discussion to become a catalyst for real cooperation and concrete action and hope.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Governance is shared, multi-stakeholder responsibility. Everybody in the AI generation has a
part to play, and we need all hands on deck!

– Governments can lead in enacting laws, protecting rights, and investing in digital public
services, as the Estonian government did in the 90s, when they earmarked 1% of state
funding for IT, transforming Estonia into one of the most advanced digital societies in the
world.
– Industry also has a role to develop and deploy AI responsibly and to be transparent about
high-risk systems
– Academia and the technical community can help evaluate models, stress-test assumptions,
and illuminate blind spots.
– Civil society can raise concerns, expose harms, and advocate for communities often left
out.
– And the UN system can continue coordinating, convening, and keeping universal values
of peace, dignity and human rights at the core as we seek to leverage AI responsibly.

You can see our progress in the latest edition of the annual UN AI Activities report compiled
by ITU which I’m proud to launch today. The report shows how the UN is integrating AI across
our work with 729 projects in 2024, up from 406 in 2023. We’re also seeing more engagement
on AI across the UN system, with 53 entities contributing to the report.

Ladies and gentlemen,

“The future is here” at the AI for Good Global Summit. But as the saying goes, it is not evenly
distributed out there, in the world. This is a transformative moment for AI technology – let’s
make it transformative for governance, too. Let this be remembered as the point we turned
the ship around.

Not when we lost control, but when we took the helm. Not when we raced in competition, but
when dialogue helped all boats rise. We don’t need to sail in the same ship, or even at the
same speed.

But we do need to navigate the same oceans together, by the same compass, under the same
stars.

And as my friend the Minister from Ghana said this afternoon: we need not look East, or West.

We need to look forward, together.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for being here. And I look forward to our continued
discussions.

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