The AI Governance Summit: Key sessions, talking points and how to livestream the event

It has been almost a year since ChatGPT launched. Within five days of the generative AI platform’s arrival on 30 November 2022, it had gained 1 million users. That number has since jumped to over 180 million, but its rapid rise has also spawned a surge in questions about how we should regulate AI.

For all its potential to boost productivity and pioneer breakthroughs, generative AI also presents very clear regulatory, security and governance dilemmas. Charting a successful path through this has rightly become a top priority for politicians and policymakers around the world.

The World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Summit, taking place in San Francisco on 13-15 November, will bring together more than 200 leaders from the AI community to strengthen and scale existing initiatives.

It also follows and will build on several other major international initiatives and agreements around AI governance and safety, including the UK's first AI Safety Summit, the EU's AI Act, the G7's Guiding Principles and Code of Conduct, the UN's AI Advisory Body, and the US's Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.

Making sure AI is used in the right way is becoming imperative as use of the technology increases. Over a fifth of people are now using AI regularly at work, and more than three-quarters have had some exposure, according to a McKinsey survey.

So what actions do we need to take to regulate AI and its use?

The AI Governance Summit will take place at the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, but will also be livestreamed online. Head to the AI Governance Summit website to watch the sessions.

The event will expand on the work of the Forum’s Responsible AI Leadership Summit in April and give the AI Governance Alliance – which the Forum launched in June – an opportunity to further refine AI governance frameworks for the public and private sectors.

Sessions will delve into topics including AI infrastructure, national AI strategies and what the future workforce might look like in the age of artificial intelligence.

The ethics of AI will be explored at the AI Governance Summit and the session around Responsible Applications and Transformation will take place on 15 November, as will discussions on Safe Systems and Technologies.

Other sessions will explore issues such as synthetic data and media. Synthetic data is seen as a potentially transformative prospect for AI. Instead of using real data – which is time-consuming and expensive to generate or acquire – AI developers think simulated data could speed up all sorts of developments.

This may be helpful in areas such as autonomous vehicles, where plausible driving situations could be recreated, but there are major ethical questions to be tackled if potentially biased synthetic data starts being applied to decisions relating to individuals, such as in credit scoring, insurance applications or healthcare considerations.

First-hand accounts of how AI is being used and developed will also be shared, including in a session on 14 November called State of GenAI: Views from the Frontier.

This will be followed on 15 November with sessions on Safe Systems and Technologies, Responsible Applications and Transformation, and Resilient Governance and Regulation.

There will also be a session on AI and Climate, looking at how artificial intelligence could be used to speed up efforts to cut emissions and limit global temperature rises.

AI could power high-precision agricultural robots that not only reduce the environmental impact of agrifood systems but could also help develop safer and more sustainable food systems.

“Human progress is increasingly interwoven with the influence of algorithms and networks,” says Cathy Li, the Forum’s Head of AI, Data and Metaverse. “The ascent of AI is not just a technological leap, but a seismic shift, replete with challenges and opportunities in equal measure.”

Finding safe and responsible ways for these opportunities to be seized and challenges to be overcome is now the goal of policymakers around the world.

It will require hard work, as AI Governance Alliance member Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs of Meta Platforms, acknowledges. But it will also require openness and collaboration, Clegg adds, and the AI Governance Summit will aim to provide that.