The Raising Digital Natives Toolkit helps parents & educators build kids’ digital fluency, safety, and resilience in today’s evolving tech landscape

Once, security was a defined discipline—a tight set of technical practices meant to keep systems safe. Today, it’s the junk drawer for every responsibility no one else wants to own.

The trust and safety work stripped from platforms for political expediency? Security now has to pick it up to succeed. The resilience planning deprioritized in favor of speed? Security must step in and own it. The ethical guardrails quietly written out of AI procurement rules? Security can’t ignore them because without that work, defense will fail.

The word security is doing too much work.

And the people holding the line are carrying a load no one team should sustain but if they must, they need to do it intentionally and strategically, because here’s why.

As AI reshapes global power, prosperity, and public trust, I’ve been testing a theory. What if leadership in the AI era isn’t about size, but clarity? What if the countries best positioned to benefit aren’t those with the most compute, but those with the sharpest sense of purpose?

That theory gained strength at the 2024 Global Action Forum, where I engaged with leaders from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The conversations were clear: the appetite to lead is there. The question is how.

Creating new policy around a cutting edge issue like AI is tricky. How can we balance the needs of innovation and regulation. More importantly, how do we sure that not person, or country, is left behind? Former White House official Camille Stewart Gloster joins David Rothkopf to discuss these pressing issues and more on Siliconsciousness podcast.

CAS Strategies and Diplomatic Courier hosted the inaugural Global AI Action Forum, a day-long convening gathering principal-level decision makers from 12 Global Majority countries including government officials and leading experts from civil society and industry to coalesce around a policy agenda to inform global AI governance developments for the upcoming French AI Action Summit, scheduled for February 10-11, 2025.