On March 18, 2026, I participated in the United Nations Informal Stakeholder Consultation on the Global Dialogue for Artificial Intelligence Governance. The meeting supported the work of the newly appointed UN Scientific Panel on AI and served as a prelude to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, scheduled for July 6–7, 2026, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Co-chaired by Ms. Egriselda López, Permanent Representative of El Salvador to the United Nations, and H.E. Mr. Rein Tammsaar, Permanent Representative of Estonia, the consultation aimed to identify key topics and inform the Co‑Chairs’ summary for the upcoming dialogue.

The United Nations hosted two consultation sessions that day, the first from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. EDT, and a second from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT to allow participation from multiple time zones. I attended the morning session, which drew more than 600 participants from around the world, including representatives from civil society organizations, NGOs, non-profits, businesses, and academia. Attendees registered with their organizational affiliations and were each given three minutes during the meeting to share their recommendations.

Some suggestions by attendees that stood out to me:

• UN should focus specifically on AI governance, as there are a lot of other frameworks on ethics, ai for good, social equality concerns of ai, but the world needs specific governance development
• Pathway for community governed institutions to contribute to the AI governance framework, not just governments and institutions contributing 
• AI governance that is inclusive, specifically for disabilities 
• Global dialogue must prioritize human rights, alignment with UN SDGs 
• Country level civil society organizations are best placed to assess ai harm or exclusion in local communities, UN framework should engage these organizations in some way
• Any framework has to then move to measurable and written principles that businesses can sign up to and be assessed against, so that AI governance and ethics doesn’t just become a line item on compliance forms
• UN dialogue in July should end with a decisive set of goals that should include- not deploying ai as an instrument of surveillance, agree to put in place transparency and reporting mechanism where any country or organization, using any language can report a harmful AI tool or system 
• Global dialogue should create a minimum standard for inclusive participation, invest in governance capacity not only AI capacity
• AI systems in non-English languages must be developed in collaboration with native speakers and their communities, ensure the availability of open source models, and well sourced data sets, to develop these multilingual tools
• Integrate environmental considerations into AI governance frameworks
• AI governance should be built as a public good, have a people-centered justice approach to understand problems and needs first
• Structured, accessible, multilingual briefings in advance of future global dialogue sessions
• To ensure recommendations from Global dialogue are adaptable, there must be review sessions, as well as rules for updating the framework

The speaker comments ended around 1:17pm EDT with recommendations from the 80th speaker. The consultation was then closed by the co-chairs with thanks to all who attended, and encouragement to submit more recommendations via the written portal.

The United Nations has also opened a written submission portal where civic minded individuals can submit their recommendations to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. It’ll be open till April 30th 2026. https://www.un.org/global-dialogue-ai-governance/en/consultations