The International Telecommunication Union and Switzerland announced that the city of Geneva will host, in June 2027, the Geneva Artificial Intelligence Summit within Artificial Intelligence Week, which brings together, over a period of 4 days, the World Summit on the Information Society Forum and the annual Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence for Good on its tenth anniversary.
This announcement came during a joint event organized by the Union and Switzerland today on the sidelines of the Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union, which reviewed the preparations for this week, and highlighted the historical partnership between the two sides that dates back to 1865, the date of the founding of the Union, whose headquarters have been hosted in Geneva for nearly 160 years, and its importance in enhancing international cooperation and employing advanced technology to serve human societies. The organizers also called on member states and innovators to actively participate in robotics competitions and national innovation displays during this huge global gathering.
In this context, His Excellency Mr. Rene Denis Cooney, Swiss Minister of State, said that the Geneva Artificial Intelligence Summit will be held under the slogan “Linking Innovation and Trust,” based on the conviction that innovation and trust are not contradictory, but rather reinforce each other, focusing on two complementary strategic priorities: the first is artificial intelligence as a driver of prosperity and progress for all, and the second is promoting the responsible and safe use of artificial intelligence, enabling innovation while providing the necessary foundations for broad and beneficial use of this technology.
He pointed out that the summit builds on a path that began in Britain in 2023 with a focus on the safety and risks of advanced artificial intelligence, and continued in Seoul in 2024 by expanding the discussion on safety, innovation and inclusion, then in Paris in 2025 by exploring the opportunities of artificial intelligence for societies and economies, and finally in New Delhi in February 2026 with a focus on communicating its benefits to all parts of the world.
He pointed out that last July, Geneva hosted the first United Nations global dialogue on the governance of artificial intelligence, to continue the discussion on internationally coordinated guarantees that keep pace with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence capabilities, stressing that the Geneva Artificial Intelligence Summit in 2027 aims to unify international efforts, coordinate technological policies, and achieve greater continuity and consistency between the three summits, reviewing the city’s pivotal role as a global center for researching and developing ways to govern technology.
For her part, Her Excellency Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union, recalled that Switzerland hosted the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society Forum in 2003, and has participated in organizing the Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit since 2017, that is, years before the widespread spread of artificial intelligence. She pointed out that the Geneva Digital Week this year will bring together about 12,000 participants from 167 countries, and she considers this an indication of the momentum that the week will carry. 2027.
Her Excellency Ms. Bogdan-Martin stressed that the simultaneity of the three events reflects different dimensions of one challenge facing countries, which is how to make innovation comprehensive, ensure that governance is informed by technological reality, and translate international cooperation into tangible benefits that people feel in their daily lives.
For her part, Dr. Ibtisam Al Mazrouei, head of the United Nations’ Artificial Intelligence for the Public Interest Initiative, who leads the team building the open source “Falcon” model, reviewed his journey from communications engineering to developing the “Noor” model, the largest Arabic linguistic model when it was launched in 2022, and then the developments it witnessed after that, before it was made available for others to build on it without starting from scratch.
She stressed that launching models alone is not enough to turn them into useful services, and that this requires an Internet connection, computing capabilities, and human skills, highlighting the digital divide, as about two billion people are still off the network, and where Internet use reaches 93% in high-income countries compared to only 32% in low-income countries.
Dr. Al Mazrouei presented two models of local solutions that won the “Artificial Intelligence Innovation Factory for Good” competition from South Africa and Tanzania, before addressing the energy and computing challenge, as the global demand for electricity in data centers is expected to nearly double from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt-hours in 2030, calling for cooperation between the technology and energy sectors, by combining the smart use of existing energy systems and investing in reliable sources, such as solar energy. Associated with round-the-clock storage.
While she stressed that human supervision remains necessary, she warned of cyber threats, and called for exchanging threat information, testing systems, and coordinating incident response.
For his part, Mr. Friedrich Werner, Head of Strategic Engagement at the International Telecommunication Union, highlighted the “Artificial Intelligence for Good” platform, saying that it has moved from the stage of experiments and experimental cases in 2017 to the stage of widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, even in countries of the Global South.
He warned that the most important question is not what artificial intelligence can do, but rather what it should do, and gave the example of a startup company from Estonia that developed a technology that detects blood sugar levels from the tone of voice, which may change the method of detecting diabetes, but at the same time raises questions about what other information the technology itself may reveal about the person.
In conclusion, Mr. Werner expected that artificial intelligence will go beyond screens through the convergence of small linguistic models, space computing, robotics, and quantum computing.