After Geneva: the world needs a floor, not perfect rules

Back from Geneva, where I attended the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. My sincere appreciation to co-chairs Ambassadors Rein Tammsaar of Estonia and Egriselda López of El Salvador, and to the United Nations teams. For the first time, nearly 170 Member States sat at one table on AI, with over 4,200 participants.

On much, the room agreed. AI will contribute immensely to medicine, the environment, social services, and productivity, and it is moving faster than anyone’s institutions. The Independent International Scientific Panel, 40 experts who delivered a first report in four months, with Prof. Dr. Melahat Bilge Demirköz of ODTÜ among them, stressed that the journey from today’s narrow AI toward AGI and beyond is outpacing scientific understanding and governments’ capacity to adapt.

The highlights for me: the Global South’s insistence that supplying the data which trains AI while the rewards accrue elsewhere is neither fair nor sensible, alongside the plain lack of resources to invest; the urgency of protecting women, children and the vulnerable, with UNICEF at the forefront; and the Secretary-General’s call for AI companies to disclose their environmental footprint. Guterres named four priorities: common safety standards, human rights red lines, capacity building, and an AI Environmental Transparency Initiative.

A floor, not a finished framework

My comment on governance is this. The pace of AI has decisively overtaken the pace of regulation. Even the EU has deferred its own high risk obligations to the end of 2027. Waiting for perfect rules is not a strategy.

Because development is moving so fast, what the world needs now is a bare minimum of globally accepted fundamentals that will not be outdated: standardised disclosure of what models are and how they were tested, transparency, independent testing and audit, incident reporting, and clear accountability. Everything else can be built on that floor without sacrificing the benefits of innovation.

I say this not as a technologist but as a capital markets practitioner who has watched cycles of regulation and their effects on global financial markets over thirty five years. And I say it with genuine encouragement: serious proposals for best practice in this fast evolving technology are now coming from every direction. Many from the private sector, Dario Amodei’s recent essay among them. From academia, from NGOs, and from countries and regions. The building blocks exist.

A question for boards

One question I keep returning to. As AI reaches every business, isn’t it time AI governance took its place in our sustainability strategies, not only where AI is built, but wherever it is used?

First published on LinkedIn, July 2026.