The Implementation Gap: who delivers global AI governance?
A closed-door breakfast roundtable during the high-level week of the eighty-first session of the United Nations General Assembly
1. Background
In August 2025, by resolution A/RES/79/325, the General Assembly established two mechanisms to carry forward the Global Digital Compact adopted as part of the Pact for the Future: the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, and the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance. Together they give every Member State, and not only the largest economies, a formal seat at the table on the governance of artificial intelligence.
The first session of the Global Dialogue was held in Geneva on 6 and 7 July 2026, co-chaired by the Permanent Representatives of El Salvador and Estonia to the United Nations, and opened by the Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly. The Scientific Panel presented its first report. Among the four priorities set out by the Secretary-General on that occasion, one was capacity-building, including a proposed global fund for artificial intelligence. The second session of the Global Dialogue will be held in New York in 2027.
A structural difficulty is now visible. Universal participation exists in principle; the institutional capacity to exercise it does not. Most foreign ministries have no designated official responsible for technology policy, no channel to the companies building the systems under discussion, and no training pathway for the diplomats who will negotiate on their behalf. The constraint on implementation is not the absence of frameworks. It is the absence of people and institutions able to deliver them.
This is the gap the Samarkand Declaration on Tech Diplomacy, adopted on 1 November 2025, was designed to close. Its central commitment is that signatory States appoint Tech Ambassadors or equivalent senior tech diplomats, including digital, cyber and AI ambassadors and special envoys for technology, and build national capacity in tech diplomacy. The Declaration has since become the organising instrument of a growing group of States, with implementation to be reviewed at the Tech Diplomacy Asia Symposium in Tashkent on 14 October 2026 and at the Tech Diplomacy Global Assembly in Paris on 11 December 2026.
2. The roundtable
Against this background, the Tech Diplomacy Global Institute, Mia AI and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan propose to convene a closed-door breakfast roundtable in New York during the high-level week of the eighty-first session of the General Assembly.
The format is deliberately small. Twenty participants, seated at one table, under the Chatham House Rule, with no press and no podium. High-level week is saturated with panels; what it lacks is unrecorded conversation among people who can act. The session is scheduled early enough to conclude before the day’s proceedings at United Nations Headquarters begin.
The roundtable is hosted at the offices of the Finnish-American Chamber of Commerce, which places the conversation in a commercial rather than a governmental setting. This is intentional: the capacity question cannot be answered by foreign ministries alone.
3. Objectives
- To examine the capacity constraint on the implementation of global artificial intelligence governance, six weeks after the first session of the Global Dialogue and in advance of its return to New York.
- To hear directly from States what their institutions most lack, in a setting where officials can speak without attribution.
- To connect the diplomatic layer with the skills layer, bringing together the appointment of Tech Ambassadors with the artificial intelligence literacy of the public institutions that must support them.
- To prepare Tashkent and Paris, by testing the questions that will be put to governments at the Tech Diplomacy Asia Symposium on 14 October and by securing participation in it.