CDO-LATAM.ORG

From the perspective of CDO Latam, community, three outcomes would define genuine success. 1st) a structured mechanism for regional voice aggregation. The Dialogue risks reproducing existing asymmetries if participation defaults to individual country statements. A successful outcome would establish formal channels for regional blocs, particularly from the Global South, to present consolidated positions. Latin America has the institutional capacity to speak with one voice on AI governance; the Dialogue should create the architecture for that to happen. 2nd) binding commitments on AI capacity-building with measurable timelines. Bridging the AI divide requires more than good intentions. A meaningful outcome would be a concrete framework, with targets, deadlines, and accountability mechanisms, for technology transfer, open-source infrastructure, and sovereign computing capacity in developing nations. Declarative language without enforcement is not governance; it is theater. 3rd) recognition of digital sovereignty as a legitimate governance objective. Interoperability and trustworthiness standards must not become instruments of technological dependency. A successful Dialogue would affirm that nations have the right to build their own AI ecosystems, including language models, data infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks, without being subordinated to the architectures of dominant tech powers. The Dialogue's greatest contribution would be to transform AI governance from a conversation among the technologically powerful into a genuinely multilateral negotiation — where Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are not recipients of decisions, but co-authors of them. Submitted by CDO Latam — the leading network of Chief Data Officers and AI leaders in Latin America.

• AI capacity-building
• Social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic and technical implications of AI
• Open-source software, open data and open AI models
• Interoperability of governance approaches

CDO Latam's selection reflects a coherent regional strategy: Latin America must move from being a recipient of AI governance decisions to becoming an active co-author of them. Our four priorities are not isolated choices, they form an interdependent framework for achieving that goal. - AI Capacity-Building is our most urgent priority because governance participation without capability is meaningless. Latin America faces critical gaps in sovereign computing infrastructure, AI talent pipelines, and institutional readiness. Closing these gaps is the precondition for meaningful engagement in every other thematic area. - Social, Economic, Ethical, Cultural, and Linguistic Implications of AI reflects a dimension that global discussions consistently underweight: the specific vulnerabilities and opportunities of developing economies. The linguistic gap alone is acute, over 700 million Spanish and Portuguese speakers remain significantly underrepresented in foundational AI models. Labor market disruption, cultural preservation, and social equity in AI adoption require dedicated analysis from a Latin American perspective, not imported frameworks. - Open-Source Software, Open Data, and Open AI Models represents the practical path to digital sovereignty. For our region, access to open models and shared data infrastructure is not an ideological preference, it is the viable alternative to permanent technological dependency on proprietary ecosystems controlled by a small number of dominant actors. This is the operational expression of the "third way" Latin America must build. - Interoperability of Governance Approaches matters because standards-setting is never neutral. As Latin American countries develop their own national AI frameworks, interoperability mechanisms must recognize regulatory diversity as legitimate, not treat harmonization as a vehicle for imposing external architectures on less powerful nations. Together, these four priorities define a governance agenda built on equity, sovereignty, and genuine multilateralism.

The thematic framework established by Resolution 79/325 is a solid foundation, but three interconnected issues risk falling between its categories and all three are acutely relevant to Latin America. - Regional Governance Architecture and Institutional Asymmetry. The Dialogue's themes address what should be governed, but not who governs and through what structures. There is no explicit theme addressing the institutional gap between regions: the absence of Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian voices in the bodies that actually set AI standards, from technical committees to multilateral negotiating tables. Digital sovereignty is not only about infrastructure; it is about decision-making power. The Dialogue should address how to structurally correct this asymmetry, not just invite diverse inputs. - AI and Democratic Governance. The intersection of AI with electoral integrity, disinformation, and institutional trust is not cleanly captured by human rights or transparency themes. In Latin America, a region where democratic institutions face persistent fragility, AI-enabled manipulation of public discourse represents a systemic governance risk that demands its own dedicated treatment, including regional early-warning mechanisms and cross-border cooperation frameworks. - Data Sovereignty as a Precondition for AI Sovereignty. AI governance discussions frequently separate data policy from AI policy. This is a false boundary. Without sovereign data infrastructure, including the right to govern how national and regional data is collected, stored, processed, and used to train AI systems, no meaningful AI sovereignty is possible. A dedicated thematic cluster on data governance as the foundation of AI governance would address a critical structural gap in the current framework. These are not peripheral concerns. For Latin America, they are the terrain where the outcomes of global AI governance will be most concretely felt.

- Impact of AI Governance Gaps on Latin America: Challenges and Opportunities Latin America stands at a paradoxical inflection point: the region possesses extraordinary assets, demographic vitality, natural resources critical to digital infrastructure, growing technical talent, and rich linguistic and cultural diversity, yet remains structurally peripheral in the governance frameworks shaping how AI will be built, deployed, and regulated globally. This gap has concrete consequences. - On Capacity-Building: The absence of coordinated international support for sovereign AI infrastructure means that most Latin American governments are making critical decisions, on cloud procurement, model adoption, and public sector AI deployment, without the technical capacity to evaluate them independently. Dependency is not a choice; it is the default outcome of inaction. - On Linguistic and Cultural Representation: Spanish and Portuguese remain severely underrepresented in large language models that are rapidly being embedded in healthcare, education, justice, and public administration across the region. Governance frameworks that do not explicitly address training data diversity are effectively encoding cultural exclusion into foundational infrastructure. - On Open Models and Digital Sovereignty: The concentration of frontier AI development among a handful of private actors in two or three countries creates structural leverage over every nation that lacks alternatives. Latin American countries attempting to develop national AI strategies, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, face a governance environment where the rules are being written by the same actors who benefit most from the absence of regulation. - The Opportunity: Latin America is not starting from zero. Regional institutions — including national AI centers, multilateral development banks, and networks like CDO Latam, have built the connective tissue for a coordinated regional response. The Dialogue represents a rare moment to convert that coordination into formal governance influence, provided the process is genuinely inclusive rather than consultative in form only.

The AI Dialogue arrives at a defining moment, when the architecture of global AI governance is still being built. Its most critical contribution is not to resolve existing debates, but to determine who participates in them on equal terms. Unlike previous frameworks, from the OECD AI Principles to the G7 Hiroshima Process, the Dialogue carries a universal membership mandate. If fulfilled seriously, it can shift the global conversation from one where developing nations are merely consulted to one where they genuinely co-author the rules. It can also serve as a connective layer across fragmented governance landscapes, allowing diverse national and regional frameworks to coexist and interoperate rather than conflict. Ultimately, international cooperation on AI is only meaningful if it produces concrete change at the national and regional level. The Dialogue must establish feedback mechanisms that translate global commitments into sovereign policy, institutional capacity, and coordinated regulatory action, particularly for regions like Latin America that have the will but not yet the structural influence to shape global outcomes. The Dialogue's success will not be measured by the elegance of its documents, but by whether it durably changes who holds power in AI governance.

Existing Initiatives the AI Dialogue Should Build Upon: - Regional and Multilateral Foundations. ECLAC's digital economy agenda, the IDB's work on digital transformation and AI readiness, and the OECD AI Principles, to which several Latin American countries are adherents, provide a substantive baseline. The Dialogue should formally integrate these frameworks rather than treat them as parallel tracks. Similarly, national AI centers such as Chile's CENIA represent the kind of sovereign institutional capacity the Dialogue should recognize, resource, and scale. - Emerging Regional Governance Architecture. Latin American countries are developing national AI strategies at different speeds and with different regulatory philosophies. The Dialogue should engage the network of these strategies, including Mexico's AI agenda, Colombia's national policy, Brazil's AI regulatory framework, and Chile's AI policy, as a collective regional input, not as isolated national submissions. Networks like CDO Latam exist precisely to aggregate and articulate this regional voice at the continental level. - The AI Dialogue's Distinctive Added Value. What none of the existing mechanisms can provide is universal legitimacy and binding normative weight. The OECD reaches 38 members; regional development banks operate through financial conditionality; voluntary commitments lack enforcement. The Dialogue has the unique capacity to establish governance principles that carry the weight of multilateral consensus, creating a reference framework that smaller and developing nations can invoke in bilateral and regional negotiations. Its added value is not technical; it is political. It can give Latin America, and the Global South broadly, the institutional leverage that existing frameworks have systematically failed to provide.

Stakeholder Contributions and Recommendations for the Format and Structure of the AI Dialogue: - Governments should engage not only as individual delegations but through coordinated regional blocs with consolidated positions. The Dialogue should create formal mechanisms for regional groupings, particularly from the Latinamerica, to present unified statements and negotiate as cohesive actors. This requires pre-session regional consultation processes, supported by the UN system, that enable smaller nations to align before entering the room. - The Private Sector must participate under clear conflict-of-interest protocols. Industry voices bring essential technical knowledge but also structural incentives to shape regulation in their favor. The Dialogue should distinguish between technical expertise contributions and policy advocacy, ensuring that the latter is transparent and counterbalanced by civil society and academic voices. - Civil Society, Academia, and Professional Networks, including organizations like CDO Latam that operate at the intersection of technical expertise and public policy, should have guaranteed speaking rights and formal submission channels, not merely observer status. These actors often carry the most grounded understanding of how AI governance failures manifest at the community and institutional level. - Structural Recommendations. The Dialogue should adopt a hybrid format combining in-person plenary sessions with structured regional pre-consultations held in local languages. Outputs should be graduated, moving from broad principles in the first session toward specific commitments with review mechanisms in subsequent ones. A permanent secretariat with regional focal points would ensure continuity between sessions and prevent institutional memory loss.

Global AI governance conversations are disproportionately shaped by a narrow set of actors: technologically advanced economies, large private sector players, and English-language academic institutions. From CDO Latam's perspective, four communities are most critically absent: - public sector practitioners in developing nations who must implement AI governance in resource-constrained environments - linguistic and cultural communities, including indigenous peoples across Latin America, whose languages and knowledge systems are entirely invisible in current frameworks - small and medium enterprises in emerging economies that bear regulatory burdens without having shaped the rules - regional professional networks capable of translating global principles into actionable continental policy. Concrete inclusion requires structural design, not goodwill gestures. The Dialogue should establish dedicated regional consultation sessions in local languages, UN-funded participation support for lower-income country representatives, and formal speaking rights, not merely observer status, for civil society and practitioner networks. Indigenous knowledge holders must be recognized as legitimate governance stakeholders from the outset, not as an afterthought once the substantive agenda has already been defined by the usual actors.

The most significant risk facing the AI Dialogue is that it defaults to the format of every multilateral process before it: plenary statements read into the record, side events attended by the already-converted, and final documents negotiated by a small drafting group. CDO Latam recommends three structural innovations that could genuinely transform engagement quality. - First, regional deliberation hubs, pre-session convenings held in each major region, in local languages, where governments, practitioners, civil society, and professional networks collectively develop consolidated regional positions before arriving in Geneva. This shifts the Dialogue from a space where diverse voices arrive unprepared to one where regions arrive with coordinated proposals ready for negotiation. - Second, practitioner-to-policymaker translation sessions, structured exchanges where technical implementers brief government delegations on the ground-level reality of AI governance gaps. Policy is consistently weakened by the distance between those who write it and those who live with its consequences. CDO Latam's network of Chief Data Officers across Latin America represents exactly the practitioner layer that is systematically absent from multilateral rooms, and whose operational knowledge is essential to designing governance that actually works. Third, a live governance laboratory track. Where participating entities present real-world AI governance challenges they are actively navigating, inviting structured peer response from other delegations and stakeholders. This transforms the Dialogue from an exchange of prepared positions into a genuine problem-solving process. Outcomes from this track could feed directly into the Dialogue's formal recommendations, creating a feedback loop between practice and policy.

CDO Latam itself represents a replicable governance model worth highlighting: a regional professional network that operates at the intersection of technical expertise, public policy, and institutional leadership, convening Chief Data Officers and AI leaders across Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and te rest of the countries in latino amreica to build shared governance capacity where national institutions alone are insufficient. Through its Annual Congress, advisory councils embedded in national contexts, and direct engagement with multilateral organizations including the OECD,, CDO Latam has demonstrated that regional practitioner networks can function as effective AI governance intermediaries, translating global principles into actionable regional policy, amplifying underrepresented voices in international forums, and building the cross-border institutional trust that formal diplomatic channels often cannot. Complementary models worth connecting include Chile's CENIA, which demonstrates how a national AI center can anchor sovereign research capacity while maintaining regional collaboration; and the OECD AI Policy Observatory, which aggregates national policy approaches into a comparative knowledge base.