International Islamic University Malaysua

A successful first Global Dialogue on AI Governance should move beyond broad principles to deliver clear, actionable, and inclusive outcomes that guide both global and national efforts. It should establish a shared set of practical priorities in key areas such as children's safety, algorithmic accountability, and equitable access, while allowing flexibility for cultural and contextual adaptation. The Dialogue should also create a concrete multi-stakeholder implementation pathway, where governments, academia, industry, and civil society are actively involved in sustained follow-up through working groups or thematic collaborations. Equally important is the meaningful inclusion of Global South perspectives, ensuring that diverse social, cultural, and developmental realities shape governance frameworks. Recognising families and children as central stakeholders—particularly in relation to digital wellbeing and parental support—would further strengthen the relevance of outcomes. Finally, success would be marked by a clear roadmap for international cooperation, including shared research agendas, pilot initiatives, and capacity-building efforts that translate dialogue into measurable and lasting impact.

• Safe, secure and trustworthy AI
• Social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic and technical implications of AI
• Protection and promotion of human rights
• AI capacity-building

My selections reflect a focus on ensuring that AI governance is socially grounded, inclusive, and responsive to the lived realities of families and communities. The social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic and technical implications of AI are particularly critical in diverse contexts such as Southeast Asia, where cultural values, religious considerations, and varying levels of digital access shape how AI is experienced and understood. AI capacity-building is equally urgent, as many parents, educators, and communities lack the knowledge and tools to effectively navigate AI-driven environments, creating gaps in protection and participation. The emphasis on transparency, accountability, and human oversight is essential given the growing influence of algorithmic systems on children's content exposure, behaviour, and identity formation, often without clear visibility or control. Finally, the protection and promotion of human rights underpins all these priorities, especially in safeguarding children's rights, preserving dignity, and ensuring equitable access to safe digital environments. Together, these areas reflect my work at the intersection of AI, families, and society, where governance must extend beyond technical regulation to include ethical, cultural, and community-based considerations.

A key cross-cutting issue that is not sufficiently captured is the need for a family-centred and socially embedded approach to AI governance. Current frameworks tend to focus on individuals, institutions, or markets, but overlook the home as a primary site where AI is experienced, interpreted, and normalised. Within this umbrella, several interconnected concerns emerge. First, algorithmic socialisation is shaping children's values, identities, and behaviours in ways that extend beyond content exposure, raising long-term developmental and cultural implications. Second, there are significant intergenerational gaps in digital and AI literacy, which affect parents' ability to guide and protect their children. Third, the lack of context-sensitive governance, particularly in Global South settings, means that AI systems and policies may not align with local cultural, linguistic, and religious realities. Finally, as AI becomes embedded in everyday support systems such as education and parenting tools, questions of trust, dependency, and decision-making authority become increasingly important. Framing these issues under a family-centred lens highlights the need for governance approaches that are not only technically robust, but also socially grounded, culturally responsive, and attentive to the lived realities of families.

In Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asian region, governance gaps in AI are becoming more apparent as governments advance regulatory responses to digital risks, particularly those affecting children and vulnerable users. Recent policy developments, including Malaysia's Online Safety framework (ONSA) and parallel considerations in countries such as Indonesia and Singapore, reflect a growing commitment to strengthening safeguards in AI-mediated environments. However, these developments also highlight key governance challenges. One significant issue is the alignment between regulatory ambition and implementation capacity, especially in contexts where digital and AI literacy among parents and communities remains uneven. There are also concerns regarding regulatory fragmentation across jurisdictions, given the transnational nature of digital platforms and AI systems. At the same time, these policy shifts present important opportunities to advance more coherent and context-sensitive governance approaches. Malaysia's evolving regulatory landscape provides a basis for integrating child-sensitive and family-centred considerations into AI governance, including frameworks that link online safety, capacity-building, and accountability mechanisms. Regionally, there is potential to strengthen coordination through shared standards, policy dialogues, and collaborative research, particularly within ASEAN. Overall, current developments underscore the need for governance models that are not only protective, but also implementable, inclusive, and aligned with societal readiness, ensuring that regulatory frameworks translate into meaningful outcomes for communities.

The AI Dialogue can play a critical role in advancing international cooperation by serving as bridging platform between global principles and local realities, ensuring that AI governance is both coordinated and context-sensitive. It can facilitate the development of shared policy frameworks and guiding principles while allowing flexibility for countries to adapt these to their socio-cultural and developmental contexts. A key role of the Dialogue is to enable structured multi-stakeholder collaboration, bringing together governments, academia, industry, and civil society to co-develop practical solutions rather than solely exchanging views. Central to this is the need for genuine inclusivity, ensuring that voices from all parts of the world, particularly from the Global South, underrepresented communities, and diverse cultural contexts are not only present but meaningfully influence outcomes. The Dialogue can also strengthen cooperation through knowledge-sharing and comparative research, supporting cross-regional learning and addressing gaps where existing governance models may not fully reflect diverse societal realities. In addition, it can advance capacity-building and pilot initiatives, encouraging collaborative projects that translate policy discussions into real-world applications, especially in areas such as digital literacy, child protection, and community-level AI use. Ultimately, the AI Dialogue should function not only as a forum for discussion, but as a catalyst for coordinated and inclusive action, fostering practical, equitable, and sustainable approaches to AI governance at the global level.

The AI Dialogue should build upon existing multilateral, regional, and multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the OECD AI Principles, the Global Digital Compact, and the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), alongside child- and family-focused frameworks including the UNICEF guidelines on AI for children, the Committee on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 25 on children's rights in the digital environment, and the WePROTECT Global Alliance efforts on online child safety. Regional mechanisms such as ASEAN digital governance frameworks and national online safety regulations further contribute practical implementation insights. While these initiatives provide strong foundations, they often operate in parallel with limited coordination and varying levels of inclusivity. The added value of the AI Dialogue lies in its ability to act as a convening and connecting mechanism that enhances policy coherence, reduces fragmentation, and bridges the gap between global principles and local realities. It can also elevate the role of families and caregivers as key stakeholders, ensuring that governance approaches are not only child-sensitive but also socially grounded. In doing so, the Dialogue can translate existing frameworks into more coordinated, inclusive, and action-oriented outcomes that are globally aligned yet locally meaningful.

Different stakeholders can contribute to the AI Dialogue by moving beyond consultation to active collaboration and implementation. Governments can provide policy direction, academia can offer research and evidence, industry can share technical expertise and improve transparency, and civil society—including educators, parents, and community organisations—can bring insights from real-world experiences, especially at the family level. It is important that these contributions are not only heard, but meaningfully reflected in outcomes. In terms of format, the AI Dialogue should adopt a clear and practical structure. Plenary sessions can set overall priorities, while smaller thematic working groups (such as child safety, capacity-building, and accountability) can develop more detailed and actionable recommendations. These groups should continue working beyond the main Dialogue to ensure follow-through. The process should also include regional consultations and hybrid participation, making it easier for stakeholders from different parts of the world to contribute. In addition, the Dialogue should include case-sharing sessions, where stakeholders present real initiatives and lessons learned. A simple system to track progress and follow-up would help ensure that discussions lead to tangible outcomes. Overall, the AI Dialogue should function as an inclusive, ongoing, and action-oriented platform that connects global discussions with practical implementation.

Several voices remain underrepresented in global discussions on AI governance, particularly those from the Global South, as well as communities directly affected by AI in everyday contexts. These include parents, children and young people, educators, community-based organisations, and culturally diverse groups whose experiences are often absent from high-level policy debates. In many cases, governance discussions are dominated by technical, governmental, and industry perspectives, which may overlook how AI is actually encountered and negotiated in homes, schools, and local communities. There is also limited representation of linguistically and culturally diverse populations, whose realities may not align with dominant, often Western-centric frameworks. To address this, more intentional and structured inclusion is needed. This can be achieved through regional consultations, community-based engagement, and partnerships with local organisations that can represent grassroots perspectives. The use of hybrid and accessible participation formats is also important to reduce barriers related to geography, resources, and language. In addition, the AI Dialogue should create dedicated spaces or tracks for underrepresented groups, ensuring that their inputs are not only collected but integrated into decision-making processes. Importantly, inclusion should go beyond symbolic representation. Mechanisms must be in place to ensure that these voices have real influence on outcomes, including through co-design of policies, participation in working groups, and involvement in pilot initiatives.

A highly effective format would be a multi-stakeholder co-creation lab that combines policy dialogue, real-world case analysis, and solution development in a single structured session. Participants from government, academia, industry, and civil society are grouped around a specific theme (e.g., child safety or AI accountability) and work through a guided process: first reviewing real case examples, then identifying key challenges, and finally co-developing practical policy recommendations or pilot ideas. This format should be supported by hybrid participation tools to ensure broader inclusion and should produce clear outputs, such as draft guidelines or action points. By integrating discussion with collaborative problem-solving, this approach ensures that engagement is dynamic, inclusive, and directly linked to actionable outcomes.

Several existing policies and practices offer practical models for effective AI governance. At the global level, the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence provides a comprehensive, values-based framework that emphasises human rights, transparency, and accountability, while the OECD AI Principles translate these into more operational policy guidance adopted by multiple countries. The Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) further supports collaboration through applied research and policy-oriented projects. In the area of child and family protection, initiatives by UNICEF-particularly its guidance on AI for children-and the Committee on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 25 on children's rights in the digital environment provide concrete direction for integrating child-sensitive considerations into governance. The WePROTECT Global Alliance also offers collaborative models for addressing online harms affecting children. At the national level, emerging online safety and AI-related regulatory frameworks, including age-appropriate design approaches and platform accountability measures, demonstrate how policy can be operationalised to address risks such as harmful content exposure and algorithmic opacity. In terms of practice, digital literacy and capacity-building platforms represent scalable solutions. For example, Malaysia's Platform Keibubapaan Digital (Platform KID) https://platformkid.my/, integrates expert knowledge, culturally grounded content, and AI-assisted tools to support parents in navigating digital environments. Such initiatives demonstrate how governance can extend beyond regulation to include community-level empowerment.