Chief Adviser to the President on the Digital Economy, Dr Hans Wijayasuriya, called for greater international cooperation to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) is inclusive, culturally relevant, and accessible to developing countries during the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva.
Addressing the summit held from July 6-7, Wijayasuriya said access to AI alone would not guarantee inclusion, arguing that AI systems must also understand the languages and cultural contexts of the people they serve.
“Inclusion will depend on whether AI understands the people it is intended to serve,” he said.
He warned that market-driven AI development would naturally prioritise the world’s largest languages, leaving hundreds of smaller languages and dialects underserved unless governments and the international community invested in language technologies, datasets and foundation models.
Wijayasuriya also stressed the importance of culturally inclusive AI, saying systems must understand local traditions, institutions, farming practices, legal systems and social norms to provide trusted and relevant services.
He said Sri Lanka’s digital transformation strategy envisages AI-powered language technologies as part of the country’s Digital Public Infrastructure, with shared capabilities such as language models, speech recognition, optical character recognition and translation services supporting government, businesses and the public.
Calling for stronger global cooperation, Wijayasuriya urged support for sovereign AI infrastructure, low-resource language technologies, open-source AI models and research partnerships to ensure smaller and developing nations become contributors, rather than merely consumers, of AI.
“The success of AI will not be measured only by the intelligence of our models. It will be measured by the diversity of the people they empower,” he said. (Newswire)