Public Trust and AI Procurement:
AI & Equality by Women at the Table; University of Cambridge; RC Trust, UA Ruhr, University of Duisburg-Essen; Council of Europe
Session 139
From Principles to Practice
When AI enters public life, it rarely arrives as something a government built. It arrives as something a government bought. The procurement contract — not the ethics charter — is where rights, transparency, and accountability are either written into a system or quietly discarded. And yet, procurement remains the most overlooked lever in AI governance.
Research across the EU and UK tells a stark story: formal, AI-specific procurement is rare. AI slips into public services through function creep, extended pilots below oversight thresholds, and framework contracts that entrench a handful of dominant vendors. By the time a system touches a citizen's life — determining benefits, flagging risk, allocating resources — the decisions that matter most have already been made, invisibly, in contract terms nobody scrutinised. The communities most reliant on public services are the same communities most exposed to algorithmic harm. That is not a coincidence. It is a governance failure — and it is one we can fix.
Successful Projects Relevant to the Thematic Focus
This session is built on evidence, not aspiration. The CHI 2026 Honourable Mention paper "It's Just a Wild, Wild West": Harnessing Public Procurement as an AI Governance Mechanism — developed by Women at the Table's AI & Equality Initiative with the University of Cambridge and RC Trust Germany — identifies seven concrete practices for responsible AI procurement, drawn from interviews with procurement professionals across the EU and UK. Those findings are already moving into the world: tested in workshops with municipalities including VNG, the association representing all Dutch municipalities, and informing direct engagement with the Council of Europe's CDNET, mandated to deliver AI procurement guidelines by end of 2026. A question first asked at a UNESCO workshop became peer-reviewed research, became working tools, and is now shaping binding-track standards. That pipeline is open — and this session is part of it.
Vision for WSIS Beyond 2025
The WSIS vision of inclusive, people-centred digital societies will not be delivered by principles alone. It will be delivered — or betrayed — contract by contract, tender by tender, clause by clause. Our vision is a procurement system that functions as the operational backbone of AI accountability: where human rights are embedded before systems are built, where citizens help define the problems before governments commission the solutions, and where the communities most exposed to algorithmic harm have a voice at the table that precedes deployment, not one that arrives too late to matter.
This session convenes the people who can make that happen. The Council of Europe's CDNET Secretariat joins to discuss AI procurement guidelines in active development. Connected by Data brings the citizen participation imperative — because procurement without public voice is governance without legitimacy. The Global Digital Compact made commitments. The AI Convention set the framework. This session does something rarer and more necessary: it writes the contract language that keeps those promises.
-
C1. The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development
-
C3. Access to information and knowledge
-
C4. Capacity building
-
C5. Building confidence and security in use of ICTs
-
C7. ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-government
-
C10. Ethical dimensions of the Information Society
C1 — The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development Governments are not only regulators of AI — they are its largest procurers. This session reframes procurement as an act of governance: a moment where public institutions can actively shape whether AI serves development goals or undermines them. By bringing together policymakers, civil society, researchers, and the Council of Europe's CDNET Secretariat, the session models the multi-stakeholder approach C1 calls for, applied to the most consequential decisions governments make about technology.
C3 — Access to information and knowledge Responsible procurement requires transparency — about how systems work, what data they use, and what outcomes they produce. This session advances audit rights, documentation standards, and open-source reuse as procurement tools, ensuring that public AI systems generate knowledge that stays in public hands rather than locked inside vendor contracts.
C4 — Capacity building Procurement officers are on the front line of AI governance but are rarely equipped for it. This session directly addresses the capacity gap: presenting evidence-based practices, tested with municipalities, that upskill procurement teams to scrutinise vendor claims, conduct human rights impact assessments, and write AI-specific contract requirements. Building this capability across governments is a prerequisite for accountable public AI.
C5 — Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs Public trust in AI-mediated services depends on governance that is visible and verifiable. When citizens know that the systems affecting their lives were procured against human rights criteria, with community input and independent audit rights, confidence follows. This session makes the case that upstream procurement discipline is the most powerful and underused tool for building the legitimacy that public AI urgently needs.
C10 — Ethical dimensions of the Information Society Procurement is where AI ethics either becomes operational or remains decorative. This session addresses the gap between principle and practice directly: translating commitments in the Global Digital Compact and the Council of Europe AI Convention into the contract clauses, tender requirements, and monitoring mechanisms that make ethical obligations enforceable. Connected by Data's contribution on citizen participation grounds this in the democratic dimension — who gets to define what responsible AI means for the communities it governs.
-
Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
-
Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
-
Goal 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
-
Goal 16: Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies
-
Goal 17: Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development
Goal 5 — Gender equality and empowering all women and girls AI systems procured without gender analysis replicate and scale existing inequalities. Public procurement is a direct lever: tender requirements can mandate disaggregated data, bias testing, and gender impact assessment before systems are deployed in female-skewed service domains — benefits, care, employment. This session puts gender-responsive procurement on the international standard-setting agenda.
Goal 10 — Reduce inequality within and among countries The communities most dependent on public services are the same communities most exposed to algorithmic harm. Procurement that embeds human rights criteria, diversifies supplier relationships beyond dominant vendors, and requires meaningful community input is procurement that actively reduces rather than entrenches structural inequality. This session makes that case with evidence from EU and UK municipalities.
Goal 11 — Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable Cities and municipalities are the primary deployers of public-facing AI — and the primary venue for this session's practitioner work. Through workshops with VNG and other municipal partners, this session builds the procurement capacity of local governments to ensure that urban AI serves all residents, including those most at risk of exclusion.
Goal 16 — Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies Accountable AI in public services is a justice issue. When procurement requires transparency, audit rights, and citizen participation — as this session advocates — it strengthens the institutions and processes through which democratic societies govern themselves. The Council of Europe's CDNET procurement guidelines, under active development, represent precisely this kind of institutional accountability infrastructure.
Goal 17 — Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development The research-to-standards pipeline this session represents — from practitioner interviews to peer-reviewed evidence to Council of Europe guidelines to municipal implementation — is a model for how international partnerships can translate global commitments into local practice. The collaboration between Women at the Table, the University of Cambridge, RC Trust Germany, Connected by Data, and the Council of Europe demonstrates what multi-stakeholder, cross-border cooperation on digital governance looks like in practice.
- Objective 1: Close all digital divides and accelerate progress across the Sustainable Development Goals
- Objective 2: Expand inclusion in and benefits from the digital economy for all
- Objective 3: Foster an inclusive, open, safe and secure digital space that respects, protects and promotes human rights
- Objective 4: Advance responsible, equitable and interoperable data governance approaches
- Objective 5: Enhance international governance of artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity
CHI 2026 Honourable Mention “It’s Just a Wild, Wild West”: Harnessing Public Procurement as an AI Governance Mechanism. The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction.