IGF 2025 Open Forum #82 Catalyzing Equitable AI Impact: The Role of International Cooperation (AI Impact Summit Pre-Event)

Technology, particularly AI, holds immense potential to address society’s most critical challenges and deliver transformative public impact by, inter alia, strengthening public service delivery, driving climate resilience, advancing education, healthcare, and agriculture, and supporting inclusive economic development. However, even as AI continues to reshape global systems at an unprecedented pace, its benefits remain unequally distributed. Research, development, and infrastructure (such as access to advanced chips, and compute resources) are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global North. In contrast, the Global South, which accounts for nearly 85% of the world’s population, faces persistent structural barriers in accessing, influencing, and deriving benefits from AI technologies. The result is an AI ecosystem disproportionately designed around the priorities, languages, and data realities of a limited set of countries, often overlooking the cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of the wider world. Without inclusive representation and equitable access, AI risks perpetuating existing inequalities and encoding systemic bias into future technological infrastructure. This not only weakens the ability of marginalized communities to benefit from AI but also undermines the credibility and universality of global AI systems. Multilateral cooperation is crucial to bridging this divide. It offers a pathway to co-develop inclusive governance frameworks, democratize access to critical AI resources, and scale AI solutions that are locally rooted and globally relevant. Existing international initiatives—ranging from the Global Digital Compact and the OECD AI Principles to GPAI and the AI Safety Institutes network—have made valuable progress. However, there remains a pressing need to align, harmonize, and operationalize these efforts to deliver meaningful and measurable AI impact at scale. This session at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2025 in Norway serves as a key precursor to the AI Impact Summit, to be hosted by India in 2026. It will initiate a global dialogue on how inclusive multilateralism can ensure that AI benefits all—irrespective of geography, income level, or infrastructure readiness—while laying the foundation for impactful, human-centered, and future-ready AI ecosystems. The panel will discuss: • Examine the structural and technological barriers that limit inclusive access to AI innovation. • Explore the consequences of the AI divide on the quality, inclusiveness, and effectiveness of AI systems globally. • Discuss how multilateral and multi-stakeholder cooperation can address these gaps—through mechanisms such as AI commons, open models, resource-sharing frameworks, and collaborative governance. • Identify actionable pathways to co-create AI solutions that are locally grounded, culturally relevant, and capable of delivering tangible development outcomes. • How can inclusive multistakeholder processes ensure that AI governance structures represent the voices and priorities of the Global South and other historically underrepresented communities? • What lessons can be drawn from successful international partnerships that have fostered capacity-building, resource-sharing, or co-development of context-relevant AI solutions? • How can we transition from principle-based commitments to implementation-oriented approaches that deliver measurable public impact, while safeguarding innovation, safety, and rights?

The session will open with a keynote address examining the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) divide, its impact on nations' ability to leverage AI's transformative potential, and how multilateral initiatives can create inclusive AI ecosystems that leave no one behind (10 mins). This will be followed by a moderated panel discussion featuring diverse voices from across regions and sectors (60 minutes) and will conclude with an interactive audience Q&A session (20 minutes).