From New Delhi to Geneva: the Road to the AI Summit 2027 – Statement by Ambassador Thomas Schneider

Statement by Ambassador Thomas Schneider, Vice-Director and Co-Director of International Relations (OFCOM) & former Chair of CoE Committee on AI (CAI)

New Delhi, 20 February 2026

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Dear Colleagues and friends from India and all over the world,

it is an honour to be here in India at this pivotal moment for global AI governance. I want to express my gratitude to the Government of India for bringing together a diverse and distinguished group of leaders, innovators, researchers, and civil society representatives from around the world.

We are very honoured and proud to be hosting the next AI Summit in Geneva in 2027. It is overwhelming to see and feel the momentum and the enthusiasm that we sense on national level among all Swiss stakeholders as well as the very positive reactions from our partners from all around the world who are all eager and willing to cooperate with us and contribute to the Summit in Geneva.

Switzerland very much welcomes and supports the focus of the AI Impact Summit which is well presented in the three Sutras: People, Progress, Planet: We fully agree that we need to develop and use AI in a way that everyone in the world can benefit from the potential that AI offers. This includes economic and societal progress for everyone. At the same time, we need to make sure that we respect human dignity and autonomy as well as our planet, which is the basis of all life that we know.

Already now, we are approached by many governmental and other stakeholders that share their ideas with us about what the Geneva Summit and the road leading up to it should focus on and achieve. Let me assure you that this is very welcome and helpful to us.

The Swiss motivation for organizing the next summit is to substantially and meaningfully contribute to achieving the goal that mankind uses the unprecedented potential of AI to do good and not bad: This potential of AI – which may be at least as transformative as the invention of the printing press, radio, television and the internet as well as the invention of combustion and other engines together – this potential must be used to raise and not lower the quality of life of all people in the world and not just a few.

AI must strengthen and not weaken the dignity and autonomy of all people in the global north, south, east and west, and help us all to live together in peace and prosperity. So we are very keen to hear your ideas about what we could and should do together to achieve this goal.

Of course, we do have some ideas on our own, but we have not yet decided about the focus of the Geneva summit. We will discuss and develop this together with you all.

And of course, there will be a Swiss flavour to it, which is based on the way we work and we understand our role in the international community: we will try to be constructive, creative and innovative and try to find pragmatic and fair solutions through bringing together all stakeholders in their respective roles and with their respective experience. At the same time, we will try not to reinvent the wheel and duplicate processes and instruments that already exist and work, but rather try to build on them.

We do already have a number of dialogue platforms for AI governance and for sharing good practices, such as the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and its national and regional initiatives, the AI for Good Summit and the Global Fora on Ethics of AI, organized by ITU, UNESCO and many other UN-related processes and fora.

We have other fora like the OECD, GPAI and other international and regional organisations. We will build on the outcomes of the previous AI Summits of Bletchley Park, Seoul, Paris and New Delhi. And we should not forget the many academic and other networks that provide expertise and solutions. We will do our best to bring them all together.

And with the help of our long standing partners of the DiploFoundation and the Geneva Internet Platform, we will also try to facilitate orientation in this complex ecosystem, in particular for less resourced communities, so that they know better about what is going on where and where we we need to raise our voices so that they are actually heard.

At the same time, we consider the transformative power of AI to be too big, broad and context-specific, so that no one single institution and no one single instrument will allow us to seize all opportunities and solve all problems. So we will have to learn to live with a certain complexity of the governance of this transformation.

But also this is not a completely new situation: if we look at how we have governed the transformative power of combustion and other engines in the past 200 years, there are some insights that we can also apply to AI:

While today, we are developing AI to automate cognitive labour, we have developed engines to automate physical labor;

We have put engines in vehicles to move people or goods from one place to another; and

We have put engines in machines to automate the production of food or other goods.

And we do not expect one single institution or instrument to govern all of this, but we have developed a set of thousands of technical, legal and societal norms that regulate not only the engines themselves, but also the machines and vehicules driven by the engines.

We have regulated the infrastructure that these machines use, we are setting requirements for and liabilities of the people that develop, handle and steer these machines. We have developed instruments that protect the rights of those affected by these machines.

And we are seeing different levels of harmonization and interoperability to this regulation: e.g. there is more harmonization in the regulation of global traffic like with airplanes than of cars which are used locally.

And after 200 years, we are still continuing to adapt the governance framework for engine-driven machines – depending on their context of use.

Now we need to do the same with AI: we need to develop appropriate technical, legal and societal norms that allow us to develop and use AI for good in the many different contexts.

And this work has already begun: we have analysed our existing governance frameworks and we have started to identify and fill the gaps: we have started to work on technical standards for AI systems, we have started to work on binding and non-binding legal instruments.

In this regard, I would like to particularly highlight the Vilnius Convention on Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law. This framework convention, of which I had the honor to lead the negotiations among 55 countries from all over the world at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, provides for a principle-based framework – not just for Europe, but for all countries on our planet that value human rights, democracy and the rule of law – so that our societies and economies can use AI to innovate, while at the same time we uphold our respect for human dignity and autonomy also in the context of AI.

The principles set out by the Vilnius Convention are simple and clear, but the Convention leaves enough leeway to participating states in order to allow them to embed these principles in their existing legal and regulatory traditions. This will allow many countries with different legal systems, but with a shared vision, to become parties to this global treaty and to make sure that their governance frameworks may be, although not identical, but at least interoperable.

This convention will hopefully soon enter into force and become one important instrument to make sure that AI is used for the good and not the bad. But it is clear that it will have to be complemented by many more binding and non-binding and more sector-specific norms and instruments – which hopefully will be coherent in their logic and spirit.

So we will use the time until the Summit in Geneva next year, to continue to identify gaps in global and regional governance of AI to achieve our shared objectives so that AI is used for innovation while at the same time legitimate concerns and risks are appropriately addressed.

Switzerland will be the host of the next summit but we know that we will not be able to achieve anything on our own. So we are looking forward to collaborate with all of you, with all countries and all stakeholders from the global north, south, east and west.

We will first try to identify the areas where there is a shared vision and a willingness to make progress together and then work with all of you on pragmatic and workable steps towards this vision.

We will only be the facilitators, trying to build bridges and build a climate of open and respectful dialogue and trying to offer pragmatic structures for trustworthy cooperation so that we all can use the potential of AI to live together in peace, prosperity and dignity.

The Swiss AI Summit 2027 Team and I personally are looking forward to collaborating with all of you in the coming months and we look forward to seeing you all in Geneva in 2027.

Thank you for your attention and support.