This week I watched a fireside chat beamed out of Geneva. On one side sat Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, one of the biggest software companies on earth. Next to him sat President Paul Kagame. The two now co-chair the same global commission on artificial intelligence. I felt such a rush of pride watching the clip that I watched it twice. ALSO READ: Kagame: Success of new commission on AI depends on public, private cooperation The AI for Good Global Commission launched at the start of this month. More than 40 members. Heads of state, senior people from Nvidia and Amazon, top UN officials. The stated job is to work out how the world adopts AI responsibly, and how it does that without leaving poorer countries further behind. A quarter of the planet, about 2.2 billion people, is still offline. That is the gap they say they'll close. ALSO READ: What to know about new global commission on AI co-chaired by Kagame For a lot of us, AI still feels like something happening somewhere else. In Silicon Valley and China. In countries that were funding research labs while some of us didn’t have reliable power or internet connection. So, a Rwandan president at the head of that table is worth pausing on. And it is not an accident. President Kagame has co-chaired the UN's Broadband Commission for about 15 years, back when the fight was getting people online. This is a similar fight, but one level up. Rwanda has earned the hearing. We went from almost no connectivity to one of the stronger digital economies on the continent. Fibre. Digital government. Irembo, where you renew a licence on your phone instead of losing a morning to a queue. So, here is the optimistic reading. A seat at that table means an African voice is in the room when the rules get written. It could mean money into research, models that understand our languages, and problems here getting solved by people who live here. ALSO READ: Kagame says investing in Africa's AI solutions a win for everyone Now the other side, because there is one. A seat is not a signature. The commission cannot bind any of those companies to anything. The CEO of Nvidia being a member does not commit Nvidia to a single thing. And these summits have a habit of leaning toward industry. One study of past AI for Good gatherings found nearly half the speakers came from tech companies, which raises a fair question about whose interests set the agenda. I work in AI every day, so I will say the silent part. Summits are very good at producing talking points. Photographs. Communiqués nobody reads. The seat could turn out to be just that, a nice photo, while the models, the data and the profits keep flowing to the same places they always have. So, this goes one of two ways. In the good version, a farmer in Cyangugu getting a straight answer about next week's rain, in Ikinyarwanda, on the cheap phone she uses to call her sister. Our very own national health intelligence center spotting an outbreak before it spreads. A young founder in a shared workspace building something that wins customers in Nairobi and Lagos. In the other version, we get the recognition and little else. We stay customers. We keep adjusting to defaults set by people who have never been here. The difference between those two futures is not the seat. It is what we do with it: whether the government, the private sector, universities, and the person coding at 1am push the same way, or whether we clap for the photo and go home. The rules of the AI era are being written right now. Africa needs to be in the room. Rwanda is making sure it is. The writer is an MIT-certified AI professional and the Co-Founder of Rwaight, Rwanda’s leading AI consultancy firm.
