GENEVA — For much of the past decade, the story of artificial intelligence has been defined by technological acceleration.
Each year brought more capable models, greater computing power and new predictions about how AI would reshape economies, transform public services and redefine geopolitical competition. Governments raced to invest. Companies competed to build. Researchers pushed the boundaries of what machines could accomplish.
Far less attention was paid to another question—one that has become impossible to ignore.
Who governs a technology whose consequences reach across every border?
This week, Geneva has become the center of that conversation.
As thousands of researchers, entrepreneurs, diplomats and policymakers gather for the AI for Good Global Summit, the United Nations is convening the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance—the first forum established by the General Assembly specifically to bring governments and stakeholders together to consider how artificial intelligence should be governed at the global level.
The decision to hold the Dialogue alongside AI for Good is no coincidence.
It reflects the growing recognition that innovation and governance can no longer be treated as separate tracks. The same technologies reshaping economies and societies are raising profound questions about security, human rights, scientific integrity, economic opportunity and international stability. Bringing those conversations together under one roof marks an important evolution in how the United Nations is approaching artificial intelligence.
An Institution That Grew Alongside the Technology
Long before artificial intelligence became a fixture of summit diplomacy, the International Telecommunication Union had begun building a different kind of forum.
When the ITU launched AI for Good in 2017, artificial intelligence remained largely the domain of researchers and technology companies. Rather than focusing on commercial competition, the initiative asked how AI could help address challenges in health care, disaster response, education, agriculture and sustainable development.
It was an unusually broad proposition.
The summit brought together engineers, entrepreneurs, governments, academics, civil society and UN agencies—not simply to showcase technological advances, but to connect innovation with global public priorities. Over time, AI for Good evolved into one of the world’s leading convening platforms on artificial intelligence, creating relationships across disciplines that few institutions were positioned to assemble.
As AI advanced at extraordinary speed, so too did the conversations taking place in Geneva.
What began as discussions about applications increasingly expanded into debates over safety, trust, standards, transparency and international cooperation. Questions once considered peripheral gradually moved to the center of the agenda.
In many respects, the governance conversation grew alongside the technology itself.
The ITU’s Expanding Role
Under the leadership of Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the ITU has increasingly positioned itself as a convener capable of bridging governments, industry, scientific institutions and the broader United Nations system.
That role is rooted in the organization’s history.
For more than 160 years, the ITU has helped countries establish common approaches to technologies that transcend national borders—from the telegraph and radio to satellites, mobile communications and the internet. Artificial intelligence presents a different challenge in both speed and scale, yet it raises a familiar institutional question: how can technological progress be matched by international cooperation?
Rather than seeking to regulate AI itself, the ITU has focused on creating trusted spaces where competing perspectives can meet. That philosophy has made AI for Good an increasingly natural home for conversations extending beyond technology into public policy and global governance.
The launch of the Global Dialogue alongside this year’s summit reflects that evolution.
From Fragmented Governance to a Global Conversation
The international debate over AI governance has accelerated almost as rapidly as the technology itself.
Governments have introduced national strategies and regulatory frameworks. Regional organizations have advanced their own approaches. Scientific bodies have warned about frontier risks, while developing countries have emphasized the importance of ensuring AI’s benefits are shared more equitably across the world.
Yet no single institution has emerged as the central venue for bringing those conversations together.
That began to change following the establishment of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, whose recommendations called for a more inclusive international governance architecture capable of keeping pace with technological change.
Those ideas gained further momentum through the Global Digital Compact, adopted at the Summit of the Future in 2024, which called for the creation of a recurring Global Dialogue on AI Governance under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Dialogue opening this week represents the first realization of that commitment.
It is designed not as a negotiating forum for binding rules, but as a permanent space where governments, scientists, industry leaders and civil society can build a common understanding of emerging challenges, identify areas for cooperation and strengthen the foundations of future governance.
A Different Measure of Success
The significance of Geneva this week is unlikely to be measured by a single declaration or negotiated outcome.
The more important achievement may be institutional.
For years, the world’s AI conversation has largely centered on capability—how quickly systems could improve and what new applications they might unlock. The gathering in Geneva suggests that another conversation is beginning to mature alongside it: how the international community develops the norms, institutions and relationships necessary to guide technologies whose effects increasingly transcend national jurisdictions.
History suggests that governance rarely arrives before technological transformation. More often, it follows periods of rapid innovation, adapting gradually as societies come to understand both the opportunities and the risks.
Artificial intelligence appears to be following that pattern.
Whether future generations look back on this week as the beginning of a durable global governance framework remains uncertain. But it is increasingly clear that the questions shaping the next era of AI will not be answered by engineers or governments alone.
They will require institutions capable of bringing the world together—and a willingness among nations to recognize that governing transformative technologies may ultimately prove as consequential as inventing them.
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