UNESCO is teaching universities to build AI capacity, not buy it

UNESCO has launched a year-long programme, anchored at Saint Joseph University of Beirut, to help higher-education institutions build their own capacity to teach and govern artificial intelligence rather than simply procure it ready-made. The design is the point.

Instead of treating AI as a product to be bought from a handful of foreign vendors, the initiative helps institutions develop curricula, policies and faculty competence so the technology is integrated on their own terms. That is the difference between owning a capability and renting one. For university systems across the Muslim world — many at risk of becoming downstream consumers of tools shaped entirely elsewhere — the model offers a template: invest in people and institutional process first, and the tooling follows.

Capacity that lives inside a university outlasts any single piece of software, and it is the only kind of capacity that lets an institution say no to a vendor and mean it.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at UNESCO: https://www.unesco.org/en/node/217106.