MBZUAI report on AI for the global south launches at India AI Impact Summit

A new report by MBZUAI has been launched at the India AI Impact Summit, focusing on the key questions that will shape the next generation of artificial intelligence – especially if it is to serve the needs of the Global South. 

AI for the Global South: 12 Critical Research Questions for the Next Decade was announced by MBZUAI’s Monojit Choudhury, Professor of Natural Language Processing, as part of his panel at the summit, ‘Challenges of the Global South’. 

The report identifies 12 urgent research priorities spanning language access, governance, infrastructure, labor markets, and cultural identity. Each is aimed at ensuring AI development reflects the realities of the Global South, where most of the world’s population lives but where local data, languages, and institutions remain underrepresented in modern AI systems. 

“AI for the Global South asks how can we make AI accessible, useful, and equally beneficial for everybody on the planet,” says Choudhury. “Unless we really start thinking now about how to get the Global South – and everybody on the planet – into this equation, we will miss the train, and the systems that we build will not serve everybody equally. 

“The main objective of the report was to come up with 12 big challenges that we could all work together to solve over the next 10 years. This will require planetary-scale interdisciplinary support, from researchers, companies, policymakers and more, from all over the world.” 

Towards more inclusive AI 

The report grew out of MBZUAI’s three-day AI for the Global South (AI4GS) workshop in December 2025. The workshop – a pre-summit event for India AI Impact Summit – was co-organized with IIT Delhi Abu Dhabi and sponsored by Microsoft. Dr. Sunayana Sitaram, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, was co-chair of the event, which saw more than 40 experts from academia, industry, civil society, and policy organizations work together to identify the most pressing research gaps faced by countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.  

Countries of the Global South account for around 85% of the world’s population and are expected to drive much of its future growth. Yet today’s AI systems are still shaped largely by data, benchmarks, and institutions in the Global North. This imbalance risks widening inequality – but it also creates an opportunity for new models of collaboration, governance, and innovation. 

Rather than prescribing solutions or paths forward, the report proposes a shared research agenda – questions designed to guide funding bodies, universities, governments, and technology companies toward inclusive, locally grounded AI systems. The questions include: 

• How can human capability be built and strengthened so that the next generation is resilient and socially responsible in an AI-driven world?
• What national, regional, and global institutional structures are required to enable AI systems for the Global South?
• How can a distributed, collaborative research network be designed to expand participation, technical capacity, and drive innovation in the Global South?
• How can we design evidence-based Impact Estimation methods for the Global South that can match the speed and scale of AI deployments while measuring real-world, context-specific outcomes?
• How can the Global South act as a “smart latecomer” to build sovereign, locally meaningful, resource-frugal AI?

MBZUAI’s wider mission

Choudhury launched the report during the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi – a gathering of global researchers, policymakers, and technologists examining how AI can support equitable development. 

Alongside Choudhury, MBZUAI was represented by Olivier Oullier, Visiting Professor of Practice, Human Computer Interaction, who spoke on the panel, ‘Culture and Code: Creative AI for Equitable Development’ – exploring how AI can democratize creativity while safeguarding authenticity, ethics, and inclusion. 

The two professors’ presence at the summit highlights MBZUAI’s commitment to global AI challenges, and reflects its broader mission of advancing AI, science, and humanity. From Arabic-centric language models such as Jais to climate-focused tools such as EarthDial and agricultural initiatives such as the Insitute for Agriculture and AI (IAAI) and AIM for Scale, the University has prioritized research that works across languages, regions, and economic contexts. 

“MBZUAI is a leader in AI, not only in the region, but also emerging as a leader worldwide. We have the largest concentration of AI researchers as far as any university is concerned, and a lot of the people here are already thinking about the questions included in the report. 

“We are a very diverse university, with students and faculty from more than 50 different countries, and a lot of them are from Global South, so these kinds of conversations are happening very naturally here. 

“Making AI equitable is certainly one thing that we want to be a leader in here, and our diversity makes MBZUAI a great place to start these kinds of conversations.” 

Feeding into this wider context, the AI4GS report is intended as a starting point – a framework to spark collaboration among universities, governments, industry, and civil-society organizations working to ensure AI delivers real-world improvements in health, education, climate resilience, economic opportunity, and cultural preservation. 

As AI reshapes economies, institutions, and daily life, AI4GS aims to ensure that its future is shared, inclusive, and shaped by the communities it serves.