Page 43 - AI Governance Day - From Principles to Implementation

AI Governance Day - From Principles to Implementation

5� Public afternoon session

5�1 Welcome speech, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU Secretary-General

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Day Zero of the AI for Good Global Summit. Our
eagerly anticipated Governance Day is off to a running start. We've already put our AI experts
and government leaders to work this morning. We've spent the entire morning exchanging
ideas on three critical topics: surveying the AI landscape and understanding how it might
evolve, looking at how to implement AI governance frameworks, and, perhaps most importantly,
discussing how we can ensure inclusion and trust as we implement those frameworks.

This morning, we heard about various governance efforts, the areas they have in common, as
well as some of their differences. Crucially, we learned from developing countries because
we want to ensure that they are not left out of the process. This challenges the argument that
governments lack initiative when it comes to tech regulation. In just a few moments, you'll be
hearing from some of our amazing roundtable participants who will be sharing the outcomes
of their work.

But first, let me tell you why we're doing this. Why are we here today? What is AI Governance
Day all about, and why are we at the ITU going to keep doing it?

As many of you know, ITU is the UN agency for digital technologies, and we have been working
to harness AI for good for the past seven years. We’ve been convening the UN system around
AI, and we’ve been co-leading an interagency coordination mechanism with UNESCO since
2021. Through our AI for Good platform, a multi-stakeholder community of 28 000 people
from over 180 countries, our focus has been on putting artificial intelligence at the service of
the Sustainable Development Goals. That's been our compass.

What’s new is this much sharper, stronger focus on governance. It's not the benefits but the
risks of artificial intelligence that keep us all awake at night. Much has been said about AI
governance in the media, academic circles, startups, tech giants, and from local governments
all the way to the United Nations, which recently adopted a historic resolution recognizing AI’s
potential to advance the SDGs.

Governance and technology – we have been here before

Ladies and gentlemen, at the heart of all of this is a conundrum: how do we govern a technology
if we don't yet know its full potential? There is no one answer to that question, but we do know
that we have been here before. Twenty years ago, the Internet was met with a similar mix of
shock, awe, and skepticism. It raised the same questions about how our economies, societies,
and environment would transform for better and for worse. We're still grappling with those
questions two decades later. In fact, we still don't know the full potential of the internet because
a third of humanity has never connected. But before we could even realize the potential,
generative AI came along.

Yet even with the convergence of these world-changing, interdependent technologies,
governance efforts have emerged. They may not be perfect, but we're not starting from scratch.
The Internet Governance Forum and the WSIS Forum were born out of the World Summit on
the Information Society. Some of you, like me, were there when this all happened 20 years

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