Excellencies,
distinguished delegates,
partners and colleagues.
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to this Solutions Stage session on GENIE.AI.
We all know artificial Intelligence is becoming one of the defining technologies of our time.
Yet, while interest in AI is growing everywhere, access to trustworthy AI remains highly uneven.
Many countries, particularly developing countries, face significant challenges when attempting to move from experimentation to implementation. Key concerns include governance,
transparency, digital sovereignty, interoperability, capacity development and long-term sustainability.
At ITU, we believe all these concerns can be addressed if trustworthiness is built into the development of public sector AI. This belief has guided our work across Digital Public Infrastructure, Digital Public Goods, and open source ecosystems. It has also inspired us to develop practical tools that help governments translate ambition into implementation.
Today, I am pleased to showcase GENIE.AI, ITU's open source reference framework for trustworthy public sector Generative AI.
It has been designed to help governments develop AI solutions that are aligned with the public interest. It combines technical building blocks, governance mechanisms, implementation guidance, and capacity development resources into a practical framework that countries can adopt and adapt according to their own priorities and contexts.
Importantly, GENIE.AI embraces open source principles,
which enable countries to reduce dependency on proprietary technologies, strengthen local innovation ecosystems, foster skills development, and build sustainable national capabilities.
Over the past year, GENIE.AI has served as the technical and governance backbone of the GenAI for Good Challenge, a pioneering initiative jointly delivered by ITU and IEEE Humanitarian Technologies.
The Challenge brought together multidisciplinary teams,
with 318 applications from 75 countries around the world,
to develop practical Generative AI solutions addressing real development challenges. These cover health, agriculture, climate resilience, and public service delivery.
What makes this initiative unique is that success was not measured solely by innovation, but by implementation.
Through this process, GENIE.AI evolved from a conceptual framework into a practical platform supporting real-world experimentation, capacity development, and country-level deployments.
We have learned that trustworthy AI requires much more than algorithms. It requires governance, local ownership and institutional capacity. And it requires ecosystems that bring together governments, innovators, technical communities and academia, as well as development partners.
These are precisely the foundations that GENIE.AI seeks to strengthen. Today's discussion will explore these experiences in greater detail. You will hear from experts and practitioners who have been directly involved in deploying and testing solutions in diverse contexts. Most importantly, we will discuss how countries can move from isolated pilots to sustainable national capabilities, with the concrete case of Kenya.
Because the real opportunity before us is not simply to deploy AI.
It is to build the conditions that enable every country to benefit from AI, safely, responsibly and on its own terms.
As the UN agency for digital technologies, ITU, and more specifically the Telecommunication Development Bureau, remains committed to supporting Member States in this journey.
Thank you for joining us today.
I wish you an engaging and productive session.
