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Between 2025 and 2026, the global AI conversation has undergone a critical shift. The central question is no longer when AI will arrive, but who actually has the infrastructure, capacity, and ecosystem to use it at all. While AI tools continue being implemented, access to the foundations that make AI usable remains deeply uneven. Connectivity gaps, limited compute and energy capacity, skills shortages, weak regulatory environments, and fragile local digital ecosystems risk creating a world where many developing countries, particularly Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States, become AI consumers only, rather than users, builders, or shapers of AI systems. AI is now widely understood as a systems challenge. It depends on the interaction of connectivity, energy, skills, regulation, trust, and local innovation ecosystems. No single actor can deliver these foundations alone. At the same time, concerns are growing around the concentration of AI development and the datasets shaping today’s models. Many of the world’s poorest and most marginalized communities remain largely absent from the data used to train AI systems, raising important questions around representation, bias, language diversity, and digital agency. This Partner2Connect interactive workshop responds directly to that reality through an immersive and participatory format called “THE SIGNAL – A Future Warning System.” The session begins with a fictional emergency transmission sent back from the year 2035. The message warns that the world has begun to split into two realities: countries capable of shaping and benefiting from AI, and countries permanently locked out of the infrastructure, ecosystems, and representation required to participate meaningfully in the AI era. Participants are invited to act not as observers, but as protagonists with agency and responsibility to change the trajectory before the divide becomes irreversible. Through Partner2Connect’s convening power, the session creates a safe, informal, and pre-competitive space to surface real constraints, align complementary efforts, and identify practical partnership opportunities that can help translate AI ambition into inclusive impact on the ground. Objectives
- Reframe AI for Good as an infrastructure and inclusion challenge, not only a technology challenge
- Highlight the risk of deepening global inequalities, structural biases, and underrepresentation if AI readiness gaps are not addressed
- Identify concrete partnership opportunities that advance AI readiness through collaboration
- Encourage the use of Partner2Connect as a platform to amplify commitments and connect partners
