Labor impact and trade windfall on agenda at Paris AI summit

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents vast opportunities if correctly chanelled but is already sharpening gender pay disparities, global leaders told a Paris summit aimed at finding common ground on the technology on Monday.

Co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Paris summit aims to lay the groundwork for governing the nascent sector, as global powers race to play leading roles in the fast-developing technology.

Technology’s shift to AI was set to be “the biggest of our lifetimes”, Google chief Sundar Pichai was due to say according to the text of his speech seen by AFP.

“We have the chance to democratize access (to a new technology) from the start,” Pichai will add.

World Trade Organization chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said her staff had calculated that “near universal adoption of AI… could increase trade by up to 14 percentage points” from its current trend.

But global “fragmentation” of regulations on the technology and data flows could see both trade and output contract, she added.

In the workplace, AI is mostly replacing humans in clerical jobs disproportionately held by women, International Labor Organization (ILO) head Gilbert Houngbo told an audience in the French capital’s opulent Grand Palais.

That risks widening the gender pay gap even though more jobs are being created than destroyed by AI on current evidence, he added.

What’s more, “there is a risk of those new jobs being paid less and sometimes with much less protection” for employees, Houngbo said.

Political leaders, including US Vice President JD Vance and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing, are set to rub shoulders in Paris with the likes of Pichai and OpenAI boss Sam Altman.

A largely suit-wearing crowd of men and women speaking languages from all over the world flocked under the glass-and-steel dome of the great hall, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition and now decked out with screens and geodesic domes.

French ‘Stargate’

Macron on Sunday had trumpeted the economic benefits of artificial intelligence, saying 109 billion euros ($113 billion) would be invested in French AI in the coming years.

That was “the equivalent for France of what the US has announced with ‘Stargate’,” he added.

That $500-billion US program led by ChatGPT maker OpenAI and the emergence of high-performing, low-cost Chinese startup DeepSeek have made clearer the technical challenges and price of entry for nations hoping to keep abreast.

For the EU, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen is expected to announce while attending the summit that around 10 public supercomputers designed for use by researchers and startups will be built.

Also on Monday, a group of more than 60 European companies such as Airbus, Volkswagen and Mistral AI launched an “EU AI Champions Initiative”.

They said that they were aiming to increase use of AI by industrial firms and stimulate the emergence of new companies.

Global governance puzzle

Away from the investment grandstanding, a group of countries, companies and philanthropic organizations on Sunday said that they would pump $400 million into a partnership called “Current AI” that would foster “public interest” approaches to the technology, including offering open-source tools.

And a group of major tech players OpenAI, former Google boss Eric Schmidt and vast gaming platform Roblox said they were launching a suite of open-source safety tools for battling harms including child sexual abuse imagery (CBAM).

Open source development refers to software makers sharing freely the inner workings of their systems so others can build on and adapt them.

While few AI makers fully respect the philosophy, “things that are even a little bit open… are starting to make it possible for the global AI community to collaborate on making AI better and more accessible,” Mark Surman, president of open-source software maker Mozilla told AFP.

On Tuesday, political leaders from around 100 countries will hold a plenary session, with notable attendees including Modi, Vance, Zhang and Von der Leyen.

France hopes that governments will agree on voluntary commitments to make AI sustainable and environmentally friendly.

But any agreement may prove elusive between blocs as diverse as the European Union, United States, China and India, each with different priorities in tech development and regulation.