The AI for Good Global Summit, the United Nations’ leading platform on AI, organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) together with the Swiss government and more than 50 UN agencies, brought governments, international organizations, academia, business, and civil society together at Palexpo.
With over 1,000 speakers and more than 300 sessions, and for the first time held back-to-back with the new UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the summit sent a clear signal: the question is no longer whether AI will transform our societies, but how we shape that transformation responsibly.
For us, the central insight was, at its core, a CSR insight: AI transformation is not a technical project but an organizational and cultural one. One figure from a session on the future of work stayed with us: roughly 68 percent of the success factors in an AI transformation lie in culture and organization, and only about a third with the individual. Anyone who wants to introduce AI responsibly must first talk about values, leadership, and collaboration, and only then about tools. Equally striking was a gap. While everyone spoke about the enormous opportunities, hardly anyone could say concretely how to deal with the risks. On regulation, the prevailing hope often seemed to be that someone else would take care of it. In our view, this inconsistency is a bigger problem than regulation itself, and it is exactly where a responsibility gap opens up that organizations like CSR-Dialogforum help to fill: where binding rules lag behind, we need voluntary commitment, ethical standards, and spaces for honest exchange.
Another recurring thread was sovereignty. The CIO of a major institution, speaking on a corporate stage, captured what moves many mission-driven organizations: no technology vendor should dictate how an institution operates. Organizations must be able to decide for themselves what to automate and what should deliberately remain human.
For us, this points to the real task ahead: AI literacy and enablement, understood as a question of social participation. If smaller and non-profit organizations fall behind on this technology, the very actors working on society’s most pressing challenges lose impact. Responsible engagement with AI therefore means both taking risks seriously and excluding no one from the opportunities. With that, AI has definitively become a CSR issue.
Authors: Benjamin Djezic, BSc, MSc and Neil Nassar, Founders of alongside (https://work-alongside.com/)
