Recorded at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, 2026.
A day-one recap. The morning centered on the digital divide and how the Global South is claiming its place in a digitized society. Then came governance, and a nanorobotics talk that stole the day.
Key takeaways
- The digital divide set the morning agenda: music making, health technology, and UNICEF’s work to connect children.
- AI governance works when the rules are measurable and interoperable. AI isn’t only a corporate tool; countries and their citizens can press for how it’s used.
- Robots still can’t do what ants manage easily: find their way home in fog and under canopy, and carry heavy loads. Repetitive training only gets so far; researchers want to learn from entomologists how ants do it.
- Scientists knew bees dance to point each other to food, but only in the last decade has AI broken down the patterns well enough to read what the dance says.
Try this with your team
Where does your organization have a say in how AI is governed, as a funder, a partner, a member of a coalition, or a voice for the people you serve? Name one place you could use it.
Going further
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Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
Ooh, that’s bright. That’s got a background to it. I’m making a video, but it has a weird background.
Just an update on some of the panels and learning sessions. The first half of the day focused on reducing the digital divide and showing the ways the Global South is advocating for its place in a digitized society. That included music making and creating health technologies. We heard from the chief AI officer of UNICEF about what’s being done to bridge the digital divide among children.
I learned more about the policies and standards that make AI governance work: governance that’s measurable and interoperable, and that cuts through the widespread understanding of AI as just a corporate tool. It can actually be shaped by the demands of countries and their citizens.
My favorite today, though, was about advances in nanorobotics, and how much researchers can learn from what has evolved so well. There are things ants do that they haven’t been able to get robots to do, because they’re not reverse engineering. They’re using repetitive training, but they aren’t learning from entomologists what gives ants such good homing, how they handle the weight they carry with the bodies they have, and how they use the sun even on foggy days under canopy cover.
Researchers knew bees did a dance to communicate where to find food, but they didn’t understand what was being communicated until they could break down the patterns using AI. That’s all happened in the last ten years.
But anyway, definitely my favorite is all the stuff about boats, because that’s amazing. Oh, now you’re distracting me. [laughter]