Building AI for the Majority: Inclusive Technology Across Languages and Emerging Markets

AI promises to transform the world — but most systems today are still built around a narrow set of languages, markets and users.

With native English speakers making up just 5% of the global population, billions of people risk being left out of the next wave of digital services if AI doesn’t evolve to reflect the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

Technology leaders and researchers working across emerging markets are changing that. Lambert Hogenhout from the ‪United Nations‬, Penn Wu from ‪TECNO‬, and Chenai Chair from the Masakhane African Languages Hub explore how AI designed for the majority — through localisation, voice-first interfaces and community-built language datasets — could expand access to education, services and economic opportunity across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

From feature phones and low-bandwidth environments to AI assistants supporting dozens of overlooked languages, the next chapter of artificial intelligence may be defined not by scale alone, but by who it finally includes.