Smart Is Not Enough For Our Democracy.

Welcome to data uncollected, a newsletter designed to enable nonprofits to listen, think, reflect, and talk about data we missed and are yet to collect. In this newsletter, we will talk about everything the raw data is capable of – from simple strategies of building equity into data+AI processes to how we can make a better community through purpose-driven analysis.

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In two weeks, the AI for Good Summit 2026 Geneva will open.

Geneva will gather some of the world's brightest minds for this summit: researchers, senior government officials, UN agency heads, foundation leaders, engineers, ethicists, ministers, organizers, and founders. The week will feature sessions, panels, communiqués, working groups, and, if history repeats itself, at least one or two memorable speeches.

Many of us will be watching from a distance, including the communities I work with, my nonprofits, and my network of readers, thinkers, and challengers. We all know that what is discussed in that room—and what is left out—can shape what becomes possible for everyone else.

That’s why, unlike in previous years, I want to focus with you on what should happen after Geneva. What comes next may matter even more than what happens during the summit.

Getting the right people together is important, and listening to their insights will teach us a lot. But that alone does not feel like enough to meet the challenges we face right now.

And just to be clear, intelligence has never been the issue in these rooms. Geneva will have plenty of smart people, thoughtful frameworks, detailed taxonomies, clear panel descriptions, and many working groups.

What I want after a summit like this are real next steps. I want to see those conversations turn into action and follow-through.

So, this edition isn’t about us hoping for certain topics to be discussed in Geneva.

It’s about what we look for in the places where summit speakers may not be present.

It’s about all of us, whether we attend or watch the Summit, taking responsibility to make the next steps happen.

Let’s name this part slowly:

• I want us to see the vocabulary of Geneva show up in funder boardrooms within the next quarter. Not in the next year-end report, the AI sub-committee’s next year priorities, or the next board meeting, where it’s decided “we can’t do AI this year”. I want to see at least one foundation, in the weeks after the summit, reevaluate its commitment to AI and the community, in alignment with the language of AI for Good shared in Geneva. Because if the language stays only in the speeches and presentations, then did the community truly benefit from it?
• I want to see nonprofits walk into their next funder meeting carrying the Responsible AI vocabulary and using it to ask harder questions. If the summit names AI governance as essential nonprofit infrastructure, I want nonprofits to use that language, those exact phrases, the next time a funder asks why they need flexible support. If the summit names community participation as labor that must be compensated, I want every consulting contract, every advisory engagement, and every story-collection process priced accordingly. Summits give people language. We can then collectively decide what that language is permitted to mean back home.
• I want to see civil society leave that Summit with ideas about AI budgets, not just frameworks. Frameworks alone are not infrastructure. A working group with no resourcing is not a commitment. I want to see specific dollar commitments – from foundations, from member states, from UN agencies, from coalitions – attached to specific civil society capacity-building, with specific timelines and specific accountability. Clarity on our budgets (as imperfect as they may be at the moment) will be the key to naming what we choose to prioritize.
• I want to see governments return home and treat civil society’s participation as a structural commitment, not a convening line item. Hosting a stakeholder consultation is not enough. Civil society should have decision-making power in national AI strategies. There should be budget lines for independent oversight bodies with real authority. I want to see laws that make civil society a necessary part of AI governance, not just an optional guest.
• I want to see the Geneva Summit take economic stability as seriously as it takes capability. This week, Oracle disclosed that it had cut nearly 13% of its workforce – roughly 21,000 jobs – over the past year, attributing the reductions directly to “the adoption and deployment of AI technologies.” The same filing acknowledged the company’s growing risks of “shortages of sufficiently skilled employees” and “loss of valuable institutional knowledge.” Meta has laid off 8,000. The pattern is not unique. It is becoming a repeating story driven by intense investor pressure to justify AI spending.

Here is what I want to see after the Summit, based on the conversations there. The Summit should not separate discussions about AI capability from those about AI labor displacement, as if they are unrelated. They are part of the same issue. Ignoring this connection is how large summits end up leaving entire workforces—nurses, paralegals, teachers, accountants, customer support staff, and many others—to handle a transition that no one is funding.

I want Geneva to ask, out loud, who is responsible for the people displaced by the technologies this summit is highlighting. What infrastructure of retraining, income support, sectoral transition, and community resilience is being built at the same pace as the deployment? Who pays for it? Who oversees it? Who decides what “sufficient” support looks like? And if the answer is “that is someone else’s problem” – the labor ministry, the social safety net, the community college, the union that may or may not still exist – then we have to regroup to define “AI for Good”. Because there is no version of democratic life that survives the rapid hollowing of its middle without the institutions of transition rising to meet it.

And right now, the deployment is moving faster than those institutions can adapt.

• I want to see the smallest organizations gain access to the resources that always get talked about at that Summit but can’t participate directly. I want those grassroots, community-centered, small-scale organizations in Nairobi, Dhaka, Kolkata, or Oaxaca to have access to the support they need. The kind of resources that researchers, ethicists, policymakers, and governments hope for in such organizations when speaking about their scale and impact at such Summits.
• I want to see the language of consent + AI move into community agreements. If we cannot translate Geneva’s ethics talk into a community-level consent practice – one that is informed, revocable, compensated, and proportional to the stakes – then we missed an opportunity. I want to see at least one model community consent agreement come out of that Summit and into use within the next 12 months.
• I want to see democratic institutions strengthened, not only AI institutions built alongside them. Every new AI body, every new oversight committee, every new multi-stakeholder governance group needs to ask itself a simple question: are we strengthening the democratic institutions that are supposed to support and empower our communities, or are we routing around them? Because I worry the chances are in favor of the latter.

There is a particular reason I keep asking this question of what happens after.

It is because AI is being designed in ways that are testing the fundamentals of democratic life, in many countries, at once. Public trust in institutions is fragile. Information environments are being reshaped by the same companies building the AI. Civil society’s thinking space is shrinking in many regions. Press freedom is narrower than it was a decade ago.

In the middle of all this, the conditions of consent, inclusion, and accountability that democratic life depends on are quietly thinning, even in countries that have not been in active wars in the past few years.

And alongside all of that, economic stability for working people is being reshaped in real time by deployment decisions made by companies and investors operating at a speed no labor system, no public retraining infrastructure, and no community-level transition fund has matched. A 21,000-person workforce reduction is not a quarterly earnings story. Full-stop.

Inside such moments, summits like Geneva do carry weight.

They prioritize. They afford shifts to what gets funded, who is considered serious, what counts as governance, what counts as good, and – increasingly – what counts as an acceptable speed of disruption. They are not neutral. They never were.

And that is precisely why what happens after matters more than what happens during.

And that is why you and I need to watch that Summit with curiosity.

And we will - to seek what can become different.

Different in our communities.

Different in a grant criterion our foundation will choose to rewrite.

Different in a policy our local and national government commits to.

Different in a contract a nonprofit signs with tech companies.

Different in a budget line that did not exist last year.

Different in the conditions a worker displaced by AI walks into when they leave the building that no longer needs them.

Different in the room temperature when a community member raises a concern about an AI system being used in their neighborhood, and the room actually shifts to listen, because we learned how to.

Wait, before you leave, if smart alone is not enough in these rooms, what should be?

Well, enough is what happens in the rooms and months when no one is watching, and when “significant” is not tied to one big tech company, one funder, one government.

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*** So, what do I want from you today (my readers)?

Share with us: What is the one thing you want to see become different in the months after a Summit like this discussing AI for Good – in your organization, your community, your sector, your country, or in the conditions facing people being displaced by AI?