The Pacific's stake in shaping AI's future

Suva, Fiji

Pacific knowledge systems, oral, relational, held collectively across generations, are not a gap for AI to fill. They're an input current AI governance frameworks are missing entirely. Kanni Wignaraja (UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific) and Munkhtuya Altangerel (UNDP Resident Representative, Pacific Office in Fiji) argue the region should be pushing for representation in the rooms setting AI's rules, not just support to adopt the tools once built.

By Kanni Wignaraja and Munkhtuya Altangerel

Last week, governments from across the world gathered in Geneva for the first session of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and a presentation of the inaugural report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. It marked an important step towards building global rules for artificial intelligence.

While unpacking what AI can do for the Pacific, let us also consider what the Pacific can contribute to the future of AI. Both questions are relevant and connected, especially from a human development progress perspective.

The initial instinct, even anxiety, in small, remote economies could be to treat AI purely as a race from behind. And there is indeed need for that catch-up. So, the Kingdom of Tonga, for example, has moved through a national Digital Readiness Assessment, brought commercial 5G online, and is rebuilding its government services around a digital-first model, including AI tools designed to help citizens interact with the state in their own language.

Similar Digital Readiness Assessments have also been undertaken across Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu, helping lay the foundations for AI adoption and digital transformation for the Pacific. This reflects strong national leadership and commitment across the government, with a willingness from the very top to jump into the race and speed up.

Foundational groundwork like this gives countries like Tonga real standing to speak on this issue from experience rather than aspiration. That includes investing in the AI skills and digital capabilities of people, to make the best use of the new data and services AI can offer.

However, framing the Pacific's AI challenge only as a catch-up exercise misses what the region is better placed to see than almost anywhere else. In Tonga, as across the Pacific, AI systems run into something they were not designed to encounter. Much of what local communities know about maritime navigation, weather, land and the ocean is oral, relational, and held collectively, passed down through practice and inter-generational responsibility rather than stored in a database. Some of it is sacred, and deliberately never written down.

The Pasifika Futures Report argues that the real question is not whether Pacific countries adopt AI, but whether technology supports the futures Pacific people want for themselves, especially younger generations. Digital Tuvalu offers perhaps the clearest example: a nation on the frontline of climate change using digital technology to preserve its culture, heritage and identity for generations to come, while advancing Simon Kofe's vision of a future in which Tuvaluans can connect with one another, explore their ancestry and culture, and access new opportunities for business and commerce.

This is not a barrier to AI adoption. It is an opportunity to shape how these technologies are designed and governed. Tonga is therefore well placed to bring this Pacific perspective to the future of AI, contributing views on identity, stewardship, culture and knowledge systems that remain largely absent from today's models and debates.

This brings up a larger missing piece in the current AI sphere – experiential and non-written knowledge and decisions, as well as intergenerational accountability, should not be viewed as peripheral considerations. They are critical inputs that remain largely absent from global AI governance discussions today. Ask the AI frameworks and models how they would treat a body of knowledge whose custodians choose not to digitise it, and the answer is that they were not built with this in mind. Not yet.

Tonga's own digital transformation gives it credibility to make this case precisely because it has not rushed. The Lagatoi Declaration, signed by Pacific ICT ministers in Port Moresby in 2023, set out a shared regional approach to digital transformation, infrastructure and governance long before AI dominated the conversation. Tonga's participation reflected a broader regional commitment: that a digitally connected Pacific should also be a secure and collaboratively governed one, built on shared standards rather than each nation solving the same problems alone.

The architecture exists.

What is now urgently needed is to deploy it. The Great Divergence that AI risks creating is not a distant concept. In March this year, Tonga hosted the Pacific launch of the report of that name, examining how the rapid acceleration of AI and digital technology is widening the gap between economies that build these systems and economies and societies that will simply live with the consequences.

Yet AI is already delivering results across the Pacific, from satellite and AI-enabled fisheries monitoring in Kiribati, which has helped recover around US$2 million annually in illegal fishing fines, to AI-assisted health diagnostics in countries including Nauru and Vanuatu. Digital innovation is advancing in Palau too, alongside partnerships with the European Union and UNCDF that are expanding digital services and AI-enabled financial inclusion across the region.

These are real wins, but they are wins within a system the Pacific did not design. The region already knows what it means to be on the wrong side of a divergence, in climate, in trade, in debt vulnerability. AI follows the same logic at greater speed. The difference is that the rules of AI are still being written, which means the divergence is not yet locked in. That window will not stay open for long. The time for the Pacific to shape the outcome is now, not once the frameworks are agreed and the tools are already being deployed.

The Pacific has spent decades demonstrating what it means to decide collectively, account for future generations, and treat traditional knowledge as sacred rather than extractive. These are not liabilities in the age of AI.

This is where a Pacific contribution can be pitched, while also driving for fairness in AI access and a gain in capabilities to even the odds in the AI race. Pacific representation in the forums shaping AI's future can and must emphasise the distinction this region brings to shape AI models and applications of the future.

Pacific Islands
Tonga
AI models and Pacific
digital innovation
Great Divergence

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