Whose Culture Will AI Carry?

Recorded at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, 2026. Published on YouTube as “The Global South Isn’t Waiting on AI.”

At the “AI for Good for All” session, ambassadors to the UN from Zambia, The Gambia, Kazakhstan, China and the Maldives described how their countries are building AI infrastructure and what fair partnership could look like.

Key takeaways

• Data safety and governance were on everyone’s mind, but the bigger worry in the room was cultural responsiveness: whose culture AI reflects and carries.
• Countries across the Global South are building their own AI infrastructure rather than waiting for it to arrive.
• The communities adopting AI should shape it. Some may leapfrog to uses a profit-first tech culture wouldn’t think of.

Try this with your team

Whose language, examples and assumptions show up in the AI outputs your organization uses? Pull one recent output and check it against the communities you serve.

Going further

Our cohort training builds this kind of critical reading into everyday AI use. For practice spotting risky inputs, try Risky Prompt → Safer Prompt.

Transcript

Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.

All right, coming in hot from the AI for Good conference in Geneva, Switzerland. There’s something called AI for Good for All that was well attended by many different ambassadors to the UN. There was someone from Zambia, from The Gambia, from Kazakhstan, from China, from the Maldives.

It was really interesting to hear the points of view of many different leaders: how they’re building infrastructure for AI in their countries, especially in the Global South, and how that partnership could look. And why data safety and governance are top of everyone’s mind.

One thing that stood out to me: oftentimes you talk about how AI could be disruptive, how it makes people think about a lot of risk and uncertainty and unsustainability, and language to some degree. But there was more of an overall worry about cultural responsivity.

It’s really interesting to think about how AlignIQ, as an organization, can strengthen and put forward the culture that needs to take ownership of AI, as it hopefully leapfrogs ahead and finds the uses of AI that we in the capitalist culture world wouldn’t even dream of.

So it’s exciting to be in this space. It’s been pretty interesting so far, and I’m looking forward to learning more.