Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Doreen Bogdan-Martin (born 1966) is an American telecommunications expert who in 2023 became the first woman to serve as Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency that coordinates global spectrum and connectivity. She had already spent decades at the ITU working to bring the unconnected online — the mission that now frames her approach to AI.

AI for Good

Bogdan-Martin presides over the ITU’s flagship “AI for Good” Global Summit, the UN’s largest gathering on artificial intelligence, where she casts AI as a development accelerator: a way for least-developed and developing countries “to leapfrog” in healthcare, agriculture, and education. She points to concrete cases — a Senegalese platform helping farmers raise yields — as proof the potential is real, not rhetorical.

Her optimism is conditional. She warns repeatedly that 2.6 billion people remain offline and risk exclusion from the AI era entirely, and she flags misinformation, deepfakes, and “weaponization of AI” as serious dangers — arguing the answer is to move “from principles to practice” with shared global standards. Her core stance, though, is affirmative: using AI to get the UN’s 2030 development agenda back on track is, she says, “no longer just an opportunity, it’s actually our responsibility.”