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AI for Good depends on global cooperation, says ITU's Doreen Bogdan-Martin
“Connectivity is an enabler, but it’s not evenly distributed,” says Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary-General of the ITU.
In a conversation with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at the 2025 AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Bogdan-Martin lays out the urgent global challenge: a widening digital divide in AI access, policy, and infrastructure. “Only 32 countries have meaningful compute capacity. And 85% don’t have an AI strategy.”
She calls for investment in local solutions, digital skills, and inclusive governance. “If we want AI for good, we need all voices at the table, not just the loudest.” From youth-led innovation to calls for global cooperation in a fragmented geopolitical climate, she underscores a simple truth: AI’s potential won’t be realized unless it’s shared.
This conversation is presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft, from the 2025 AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. The Global Stage series convenes global leaders for critical conversations on the geopolitical and technological trends shaping our world.
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- How AI for Good is tackling the digital divide ›
- What is Artificial Intelligence “good” for? ›
- Should internet be free for everyone? A Global Stage debate ›
Demonstration of AI innovation at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 7, 2025.
What is Artificial Intelligence “good” for?
Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, it’s been nearly impossible to attend a global conference — from Davos to Delhi — without encountering a slew of panels and keynote speeches on artificial intelligence. Will AI make our lives easier, or will it destroy humanity? Can it be a force for good? Can AI be regulated without stifling innovation?
At the ripe old age of eight, the AI for Good Summit is now a veteran voice in this rapidly-evolving dialogue. It kicks off today in Geneva, Switzerland, for what promises to be its most ambitious edition yet.
Launched in 2017 by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the gathering typically features conversations on AI safety, access, and governance, but also serves as a “show and tell” moment for innovators spotlighting the latest in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and AI-based tools to combat climate change.
This year, AI for Good is being held at the massive Palexpo, Geneva’s largest convention center, with thousands expected to attend over four days. GZERO is there all week for our Global Stage series, produced in partnership with Microsoft, to help you understand what this summit is and why it’s such a hot ticket (as far as international conferences go).
What is ITU, and why does it host AI for Good? The ITU, founded in 1865, is the UN’s agency for communication technologies. In fact, it was formed 160 years ago as the International Telegraph Union, just as that electronic correspondence method was changing how messages spread across the world. ITU is perhaps best known for establishing global telecom standards, but it’s been playing a growing role in helping more people access the Internet and all the benefits that can bring.
ITU launched “AI for Good” as a platform to connect technology developers and innovators with organizations working on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which seek to bring more people into health and socioeconomic stability by eradicating key challenges like extreme poverty, hunger, and gender inequality.
“We’ve been very consistent and true to our original mission,” the ITU’s Frederic Werner, a summit co-founder, told GZERO. “It was identifying practical applications of AI to solve global challenges and to foster partnerships to make that happen for global impact.”
What happens this week? Expect lots of discussion about the future of jobs and how agentic AI – meaning AI that is autonomously self-improving – could impact companies and the workforce. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will address participants on that theme, and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, now an ITU ambassador, will speak about the importance of training and educating people to work effectively with AI.
Throughout the Palexpo, startup founders and established companies alike will be sharing their creations — like interactive robots and flying cars (more like drones that can carry people, but cool nonetheless). The summit also highlights AI youth initiatives and inventions from around the world.
There will also be a day devoted to policy and regulatory frameworks surrounding AI, a speech from Estonia’s President Alar Karis, and a presentation of suggested standards for AI encompassing everything from healthcare applications to the risks of AI-generated misinformation.
Why does the summit matter right now? For starters, the global “digital divide” remains vast. An estimated 2.6 billion people, a third of the world’s population, still lack Internet connectivity altogether. And nearly 150 years after Thomas Edison introduced the incandescent light bulb, 700 million people still don’t have the electricity to power one. Most are in the Global South.
As more and more industries adopt and deploy AI, the technology could contribute as much as $20 trillion to the global economy through 2030, driving as much as 3.5% of the world’s GDP by then. But the largest and most developed economies, primarily the US and China, stand to gain the most right now, while poorer countries fall further behind.
Conversations in Geneva this week are confronting that concern, calling for “cooperation” and greater global inclusion in the AI economy. In today’s deeply fragmented geopolitical reality, that may be much further in the distance than a self-flying passenger drone.
See GZERO’s complete interview with AI for Good co-founder Frederic Werner here.
How AI for Good is tackling the digital divide
“AI is too important to be left to the experts,” says Frederic Werner, co-founder of the AI for Good Summit and head of strategic engagement at ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the United Nations' agency for digital technologies.
Speaking with GZERO's Tony Maciulis on the eve of the 2025 AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Werner reflects on how artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved from early promise to real-world applications—from disaster response to healthcare. But with 2.6 billion people still offline, he warns of a growing digital divide and urges leaders to build inclusive systems from the ground up. “It’s not about connectivity for the sake of it—it’s about unlocking local solutions for local problems,” he says.
As AI and quantum computing reshape our future, Werner calls for partnerships across governments, private sector, and civil society to ensure global impact. “The wind may shift,” he adds, “but our mission stays the same: using AI to solve humanity’s biggest challenges.”
This conversation is presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft, from the 2025 AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. The Global Stage series convenes global leaders for critical conversations on the geopolitical and technological trends shaping our world.
American President Donald Trump's X Page is seen displayed on a smartphone with a Tiktok logo in the background
Where we get our news - and why it changes everything
In August 1991, a handful of high-ranking Soviet officials launched a military coup to halt what they believed (correctly) was the steady disintegration of the Soviet Union. Their first step was to seize control of the flow of information across the USSR by ordering state television to begin broadcasting a Bolshoi Theatre production of Swan Lake on a continuous loop until further notice. (Click that link for some prehistoric GZERO coverage of that event.)
Even in the decade that followed the Cold War’s end, citizens of both authoritarian states and democracies had far fewer sources of reliable information than today about what was happening in their communities, across their countries and around the world.
Earlier this month, the Reuters Institute published its 14th annual Digital News Report, which Reuters claims is the “most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.” Its findings detail just how fundamentally different today’s media landscape has become. Here are some key takeaways that help us understand how and where people get their information and ideas about what’s happening today:
- “News use across online platforms continues to fragment.”
- “Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States.”
- “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”
- “Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.”
- Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates.
- There’s no reason to expect these trends won’t continue indefinitely.
There’s much more in the Reuters report, but today let’s focus on a few political implications of the points above.
In the years since social media and online influencers began shaping our perception of reality, we’ve seen strong anti-establishment political trends. Think Brexit, the election of charismatic political outsiders (like Donald Trump), and a move away from long-entrenched political establishments in dozens of countries.
Social media algorithms create “filter bubbles” as algorithms feed us steady supplies of what they’ve learned we like at the expense of new information and ideas that make us question what we believe. That trend helps explain the worsening polarization we see in the United States and many European countries.
That problem is compounded by the increasing prevalence in social media feeds of AI bots, which can generate heavy volumes of false information, distorting our sense of reality every day and in real time.
All these trends will make politics, particularly in democracies, much less predictable over time as elections swing outcomes between competing ideologies.
As a source of news and insight, social media has brought billions of people directly into the political lives of their countries in ways unimaginable a generation ago. They’ll continue to play a positive role in helping news consumers and voters learn more and share their views. But the unreliability of so many social media information sources — and the political volatility it increasingly generates — create problems that will only become more complex as technologies change.
And this problem is intensifying at a time when more of the big threats facing governments extend across borders — the eruption of more regional wars, climate change fallout, management of refugee flows, and governance of artificial intelligence. Big ideological swings following elections will make long-term multinational cooperation much more complicated.
Tell us what you think. How should our elected leaders, media sources, and all of us news consumers respond to these challenges? Let us know here.
The Graphic Truth: The majors least likely to get you a job out of college
A rising number of US college graduates are having trouble securing jobs. The Class of 2025 is up against the toughest labor market in four years, with the unemployment rate for recent graduates sitting nearly two percentage points above than the national average of 4%. Trade tensions are also raising fears of a global recession.
On top of these short-term economic factors is a major long-term one: experts say that many entry-level positions – particularly in the tech sector – are being displaced by artificial intelligence. Here’s a look at the majors least likely to lead to a job after college.
Maybe majoring in history was not such a bad idea after all.
Elon Musk steps down from Trump administration
Elon Musk’s exit from his role at DOGE marks a turning point in the Trump administration.
In this Quick Take, Ian Bremmer breaks down Elon Musk’s departure from the White House noting, “The impact of DOGE turns out to be one of the less successful experiments of the administration.”
With Musk stepping away to focus on Tesla, SpaceX, and his AI ventures, Ian explores the broader implications including missed opportunities in government reform, civil service cuts, and the political optics ahead of the US midterm elections.
An OpenAI insider warns of the reckless race to AI dominance
Are AI companies being reckless and ignoring safety concerns in the race to develop superintelligence? On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer is joined by former OpenAI whistleblower and executive director of the AI Futures Project, Daniel Kokotajlo, to discuss new developments in artificial intelligence and his concerns that big tech companies like OpenAI and DeepMind are too focused on beating each other to create new, powerful AI systems and not focused enough on safety guardrails, oversight, and existential risk. Kokotajlo left OpenAI last year over deep concerns about the direction of its AI development and argues tech companies are dangerously unprepared for the arrival of superintelligent AI. If he’s right, humanity is barreling toward an era of unprecedented power without a safety net, one where the future of AI is decided not by careful planning, but by who gets there first.
“OpenAI and other companies are just not giving these issues the investment they need,” Kokotajlo warns, “We need to make sure that the control over the army of superintelligences is not something one man or one tiny group of people gets to have.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
AI superintelligence is coming. Should we be worried?
Are AI companies recklessly racing toward artificial superintelligence or can we avoid a worst case scenario? On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer sits down with Daniel Kokotajlo, co-author of AI 2027, a new report that forecasts how artificial intelligence might progress over the next few years. As AI approaches human-level intelligence, AI 2027 predicts its impact will “exceed that of the Industrial Revolution,” but it warns of a future where tech firms race to develop superintelligence, safety rails are ignored, and AI systems go rogue, wreaking havoc on the global order. Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher, left the company last year warning the company was ignoring safety concerns and avoiding oversight in its race to develop more and more powerful AI. Kokotajlo joins Bremmer to talk about the race to superhuman AI, the existential risk, and what policymakers and tech firms should be doing right now to prepare for an AI future experts warn is only a few short years away.
“One of the unfortunate situations that we're in as a species right now is that humanity in general mostly fixes problems after they happen,” Kokotajlo says, “Unfortunately, the problem of losing control of your army of super intelligences is a problem that we can't afford to wait and see how it goes and then fix it afterwards.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.