Can AI help solve global crises?

AI for Good Global Summit · 7 July 2026 · Geneva
Session
“Can AI help solve global crises?”, a GZERO Media Global Stage panel recorded at the summit, produced in partnership with Microsoft
Moderator
Tony Maciulis (Global Chief Content Officer, GZERO Media)
Panellists
Brad Smith (Vice Chair and President, Microsoft); Annalena Baerbock (President of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly); Amandeep Singh Gill (UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies); Celeste Saulo (Secretary-General, World Meteorological Organization); Kamal Kishore (Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction)

The disagreement worth reporting

Panels at summits like this usually resolve into agreement. This one did not, and the fault line ran between two senior UN officials on the question the summit exists to answer. Amandeep Singh Gill, the Secretary-General’s envoy on digital technology, said plainly that AI will not move the 2030 goals, and gave the reason.

Amandeep Singh Gill, UN Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies: “I think AI will not be able to impact the achievement of the SDGs target that much because we are not ready for it. The compute capacity, the talent, the data sets, the kind of tuned models you need in context are simply not there.”
Amandeep Singh Gill: “All of Africa has less than 1% of the data center capacity in the world, which is highly concentrated in the U.S. and in China.”

Annalena Baerbock, presiding over the General Assembly, twice flagged that she was choosing to look at the good side, casting AI as a chance to bridge an old divide by leapfrogging. But she conceded the premise, and her sentence is the one that holds the two positions together.

Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly: “We have to understand that AI is not a super weapon for all. And if we are not delivering on the basics, then it doesn’t help that in theory we could reach everybody.”
Our read: The disagreement is about sequence, not direction. Nobody on this panel thinks AI is useless for development; the argument is whether it can matter before 2030, when the compute, the connectivity and the data are not in place. Gill’s position, that the honest move is to keep investing in unglamorous digital basics and wait for the next iteration, is the harder thing to say from a stage sponsored by the companies selling the current one.

The divide inside the divide

Brad Smith of Microsoft supplied the adoption numbers, and the second half of his point is the one that usually goes missing.

Brad Smith, Microsoft: “In the global north today, about 27 percent of the population is using generative AI. In the global South, it’s 15. So 15, 27, that is a divide, and it’s growing. Within the global North, you also see a divide, and that’s between urban areas and rural areas.”

Gill added the ladder that a connectivity statistic tends to hide, and it is a measurement argument as much as a development one. Being counted as connected is not the same as being able to do anything with it.

Amandeep Singh Gill: “The distance we need to travel from exclusion to access, then access to capacity.”

What AI has actually changed

The concrete gains were in forecasting and disaster response, and they are not small. Celeste Saulo of the WMO, a meteorologist by training, gave the before-and-after.

Celeste Saulo, World Meteorological Organization: “When I was a PhD student, it took me a week to simulate one day forecast, and now with AI, you need only a couple of minutes to generate three or four days forecasts.”

Smith described AI and satellite imagery cutting the time to direct rescue teams from days to a few hours. Kamal Kishore of UNDRR set the coverage gap against it: 128 countries, about 65%, have multi-hazard early-warning systems, and the goal is all of them. He also noted the limit of the vocabulary, since earthquakes admit early alerts, not early warnings.

The counting angle

The panel converged, from four directions, on the least glamorous thing in the room. Kishore could not obtain sex-disaggregated death tolls from disasters, eleven years into the Sendai Framework. His prescription was cultural rather than technical.

Kamal Kishore, UNDRR: “While we work on AI and its applications, we have to make the dull and boring task of collecting and systematizing data really cool.”

Smith, whose company sells the models, landed on the same floor, and it is the single best sentence for what this publication tracks.

Brad Smith: “It just starts with people being able to count things on the ground.”

Gill pushed toward building data commons as global public goods, with governance bifurcated between open public data and protected personal data, and warned that humanitarian data is dual use: a record of who collects food for how many people can identify a large family or a group of fighters. He pointed to the Red Cross digital emblem as the analogue precedent.

Why it matters for the SDGs

The session ranges across SDG 13 (early warning and climate), SDG 9 and SDG 10 (compute, connectivity and the widening adoption gap), and SDG 17 (data, capacity and finance). It is also the clearest statement in the July cluster of a claim this site keeps encountering from different rooms: the binding constraint on using AI for the goals is not model quality but the ground-level statistics the models would have to run on, and the institutional will to gather them. The same argument was made at Science Day in New York two days later, where the missing thing was impact data, and at the statistics and AI side event, where it was the people who never enter a dataset.

Watch & read

The summit publishes no official transcript. Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the recorded video and should be read as close paraphrase. Speaker names and titles were reconciled against public records; the transcript garbled several. The date is inferred from a panellist’s reference to the Global Dialogue being on its second day. Figures are as cited by the speakers and were not independently verified, except where noted elsewhere on this site.