The Odyssean Institute

A successful first Global Dialogue on AI Governance would establish a durable mechanism bridging national AI governance experimentation with worldwide coordination, ensuring international frameworks are based in real-world policy learning throughout diverse local contexts. A key success outcome would be formalising a "bridge architecture" between national deliberation processes and global governance forums. Insights from the Odyssean Institute's application of the 'Odyssean Process' in the UK National Citizens' Assembly on AI and the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group show how national-level deliberation can generate structured, policy-relevant foresight directly transferable to global governance discussions. Second, the Dialogue should embed a "Citizens' Track" - systematically connecting distributed national assemblies to global AI governance processes. This ensures global deliberation reflects not only global expert consensus but also comparative public values across national jurisdictions. Insights from national processes (e.g. UK deliberative findings) and Global South contexts (e.g. India AI Study Group outputs) can be synthesised into global policy development. A successful Dialogue moves beyond consultation toward institutionalised transnational learning loops, ensuring AI governance is co-produced across national and global levels rather than fragmented between them.

• Safe, secure and trustworthy AI
• Social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic and technical implications of AI
• Protection and promotion of human rights
• Transparency, accountability, and human oversight

These priorities reflect the need for AI governance to be both technically robust and democratically legitimate across national and global contexts. The social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic, and technical implications of AI are central to ensuring governance represents real-world diversity. Through the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group and UK citizens' deliberation processes, we observe AI impacts are deeply context-dependent, especially across disparate Global North and South settings. Protection and promotion of human rights must be embedded in AI governance frameworks ensuring technological development does not erode autonomy, dignity, or democratic participation. This is especially important to keep global governance frameworks inclusive and prevent control by narrow epistemic or geopolitical perspectives. Finally, transparency, accountability, and human oversight are essential to preserving trust and legitimacy. These principles strengthen when supervisory mechanisms incorporate both expert and citizen input, as shown in our Odyssean Process applications. Importantly, our work - particularly the AI Study Group for India - has been presented to the OECD Global Foresight Community, strengthening the relevance of these priorities in international policy dialogue and enabling cross-jurisdictional learning between India, the UK, and wider global governance networks.

A key cross-cutting issue is developing multi-level governance systems that bridge national AI policy experimentation with global coordination mechanisms. Our experience applying the Odyssean Process in the UK and India shows AI governance innovation is already occurring nationally, but these insights are not yet systematically integrated into global frameworks. This risks fragmented learning and duplicated governance effort, lessening overall effectiveness. A second issue is the requirement for structured knowledge transfer between Global North and Global South governance contexts. Through the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group and its presentation to the OECD Global Foresight Community, we demonstrated the value of creating forums where diverse governance experiences inform global policy development. A third issue is epistemic integration across governance scales. Effective AI governance requires combining citizen deliberation, expert analysis and institutional foresight in ways transferable across jurisdictions while remaining context-sensitive. Together, these problems point to the need for bridging institutions and methodologies that connect national deliberative experimentation with global AI governance design.

Across the UK and India - where the Odyssean Institute is exploring AI regulation - governance gaps in safe, secure, and trustworthy AI; human rights protection; transparency and accountability; and broader societal implications of AI create a shared structural challenge. This is the rapid deployment of AI systems without grounded, participatory, and adaptive governance mechanisms. In the UK, progress on AI safety and assurance frameworks is not matched by institutionalised mechanisms for public input and oversight. This creates risks to legitimacy and trust, especially where AI systems affect employment, public services, and democratic processes. Transparency and accountability efforts remain largely technical, with limited citizen input in audit, monitoring, or regulatory design. In India, the challenge is more acute due to scale, diversity, and uneven capacity. AI governance must consider linguistic plurality, socio-economic inequality and varying levels of digital access. Without this, AI advances risk reinforcing structural inequalities and undermining human rights protections in practice, even where high-level principles exist. Across both contexts, a critical shared gap is the lack of mechanisms to translate national governance insights into global frameworks. This causes fragmentation, with lessons on safety, rights, and accountability not systematically shared or integrated. However, this also presents a major opportunity. Through the Odyssean Process - applied in the UK National Citizens' Assembly on AI and the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group - we demonstrate how deliberation, foresight, and expert integration can generate context-sensitive yet globally relevant governance insights. The presentation of India Study Group findings to the OECD Global Foresight Community further illustrates how these insights can inform international dialogue. The key opportunity is to build bridging institutions that connect national governance innovation with global coordination, strengthening both effectiveness and legitimacy in AI governance.

The AI Dialogue can play a central function in advancing international cooperation through bridging national AI governance experimentation and global coordination mechanisms. A key opportunity lies in systematically embedding insights from national processes - such as the UK National Citizens' Assembly on AI and the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group - into global discussions. These initiatives reveal how structured deliberation under the Odyssean Process can generate actionable governance insights across very different social-political contexts. Importantly, the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group has already been presented to the OECD Global Foresight Community, demonstrating the relevance of these national-level insights concerning international policy coordination. The Dialogue can build on this by creating formal mechanisms for two-way learning between national and global governance systems, making sure that global frameworks are informed by diverse institutional and cultural settings. It can also support capacity-building for distributed governance innovation, enabling countries to adjust and localise global principles while contributing their own insights to global processes. In this way, the Dialogue acts not only as a forum for discussion but also as a coordination infrastructure for transnational AI governance learning and alignment.

The AI Dialogue should explicitly connect and synthesise existing national and transnational governance experimentation into a coherent global architecture. Specifically, we propose the Global Dialogue build upon the existing initiatives of the Odyssean Institute: 1. The UK National Citizens' Assembly on AI, applying the Odyssean Process to structured democratic deliberation, and; 2. The AI Policy Futures for India Study Group, developed in collaboration with Sustainable Living Lab (SL2), explores long-term AI governance pathways in a Global South context. This included the presentation of the India Study Group findings to the OECD Global Foresight Community, enabling early-stage international policy dialogue. The added value of the AI Dialogue lies in its ability to: - Bridge national governance experimentation with global policy formation - Create structured feedback loops between the UK, India, and other national contexts - particularly the Global North and Global South - Enable comparative learning across diverse regulatory environments. - Strengthen coherence across fragmented global AI governance initiatives. This would transform the Dialogue into a meta-governance platform, capable of integrating distributed innovation into a shared global governance architecture.

Different stakeholders should contribute through clearly defined but interconnected roles within a structured, multi-level governance architecture: a) Governments should commit to integrating Dialogue outcomes into policy processes and to contributing national-level insights from regulatory experimentation. b) Civil society organisations should facilitate community engagement and ensure that underrepresented voices are included. c) Academia and expert communities should provide foresight, technical analysis and comparative governance insights. d) Private sector actors should engage transparently, contributing practical perspectives while responding to public accountability expectations. Citizens should participate through structured deliberative processes that feed into the Dialogue. To enable this, the Dialogue should adopt a bridging format that connects national and global levels: - National-to-global synthesis sessions: Dedicated sessions where outputs from national processes - such as citizens' assemblies in the UK and foresight initiatives like the India Study Group - are presented and comparatively analysed. - Live integration of ongoing deliberations: Structured link-ups with active citizen dialogues, allowing real-time interaction between global stakeholders and local participants. - Foresight and scenario-based workshops: Multi-stakeholder sessions exploring long-term AI futures, enabling alignment across jurisdictions under uncertainty. - Institutionalised "docking points" for a Citizens' Track: Formal pathways for integrating outputs from distributed deliberative processes into core Dialogue outcomes. This structure ensures that the Dialogue functions not only as a forum, but as a coordination mechanism for continuous, transnational governance learning.

Global AI governance discussions systematically underrepresent those most affected by AI's impacts, particularly across diverse socio-economic and geographic contexts. This includes: - Communities in the Global South navigating rapid AI adoption under constrained governance capacity - Workers embedded in AI supply chains (e.g. data labelling and platform-mediated labour) - Linguistically and culturally diverse populations whose contexts are poorly reflected in dominant AI models - Individuals without reliable digital access, whose lives are nonetheless shaped by AI-driven systems - Youth and older populations, who experience distinct long-term and intergenerational impacts A key challenge is that existing participation models are often centralised, technical, and access-dependent, limiting inclusion. Addressing this requires a shift toward distributed, locally embedded deliberation models. Through the Odyssean Process, we demonstrate how national-level deliberative and foresight processes - such as the UK Citizens' Assembly and India Study Group - can systematically include diverse perspectives while generating structured, policy-relevant outputs. Inclusion should therefore be enabled through: - Civic lottery (sortition) mechanisms: to ensure demographic representativeness - Partnerships with local organisations: to facilitate "last-mile" engagement & multilingual, culturally adaptive deliberation formats - Clear pathways for integrating local insights into global processes The AI Dialogue does not need to directly coordinate all participation. Its critical role is to recognise, connect, and respond to distributed voices, creating incentives for broader and more meaningful global engagement.

Innovative engagement formats should be designed around integrated deliberation, foresight, and multi-level knowledge exchange, as operationalised through the Odyssean Process. This is a novel participatory foresight protocol developed by The Odyssean Institute. At its core, the Odyssean Process combines citizen deliberation, expert elicitation and anticipatory foresight into a single structured engagement architecture. Applying this to the AI Dialogue would enable a step-change in how participation translates into governance outcomes. First, the Dialogue should incorporate Horizon Summit-style sessions - a flagship component of the Odyssean Process. These are structured, multi-stakeholder deliberations that integrate horizon scanning, scenario exploration, and facilitated dialogue. Participants (citizens, experts, policymakers) engage with emerging AI risks and opportunities, including second- and third-order impacts, to generate policy-relevant insights under conditions of uncertainty. Second, integrated citizen-expert deliberation modules should be embedded throughout the Dialogue. Using methodologies such as the IDEA Protocol (expert elicitation) alongside sortition-based citizen participation, these modules ensure epistemic plurality, preventing dominance by any single knowledge group while maintaining analytical rigour. Third, the Dialogue should include national-to-global synthesis loops, where outputs from Odyssean Process applications - such as the UK National Citizens' Assembly on AI and the AI Policy Futures for India Study Group - are systematically compared and integrated. This creates a continuous feedback system between national experimentation and global governance. Fourth, Decision-Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) workshops should be used to stress-test governance options across multiple plausible futures, supporting more robust and adaptive policy design. Finally, the Dialogue should formalise "docking points" for a Citizens' Track, ensuring that outputs from distributed Odyssean Process applications feed directly into global outcomes. Together, these formats position the Dialogue as a participatory, foresight-driven governance system, capable of bridging local insight with global coordination.

Effective AI governance requires approaches that can operate across multiple jurisdictions, knowledge systems, and governance scales. Key approaches applied by The Odyssean Institute include: - The UK National Citizens' Assembly on AI - Applying the Odyssean Process at the national level in the UK, demonstrating how structured deliberation and foresight can be adapted to different political and cultural environments as generating comparable governance insights. - AI Policy Futures for India Study Group - A multi-month foresight and deliberation process exploring long-term AI governance pathways in the Global South, with outputs presented to the OECD Global Foresight Community. Together, these approaches demonstrate how AI governance can evolve into a distributed, learning-based global system, in which national experimentation informs global coordination and global frameworks support local adaptation.