Don’t waste the crisis: How AI can help reinvent International Geneva

International Geneva stands at a critical turning point. The city’s global institutions face unprecedented challenges: financial austerity, declining faith in multilateralism, and intensifying geopolitical tensions. 

So, how could Geneva respond? Cash infusions might offer some relief in the face of budget cuts, but the depth of challenges ahead requires more transformative changes to secure Geneva’s future relevance.

Artificial intelligence (AI), often cast as a disruptor, could instead become Geneva’s rescuer: applied smartly, the technology can help revitalise the city’s humanitarian tradition, modernise its vast knowledge networks, and equip its workforce and organisations for a future that has already arrived.

As AI becomes a commodity through open-source and free AI platforms and tools, AI transformation won’t require massive investment in infrastructure. Instead, Geneva needs an innovative bottom-up AI approach supported by modest and targeted funding. 

Below, you can find oultine of AI transformation strategy starting with immediate actions to deal with job losses via organisational changes leading to preserving Geneva’s knowledge and inspiring global AI governance. Each proposal is paired with practical implementation steps which are technically feasible and financially affordable. 

1. Preparing people for AI transformation

The most urgent action is about the city’s workforce. Job losses across International Geneva have already begun due to budgetary cuts and automation of administrative and text-centered professions. These trends affecting thousands of people are likely to accelerate. Dealing with immediate job crises should be coupled with longer-term adjustment of the educational system to pedagogical changes and challenges brought about by AI. Preparation of Geneva’s citizens for AI transformation should be comprehensive and multi-speed.  

Actions

AI Chômage and Apprenticeships

Launch an AI apprenticeship focusing on reskilling those lost jobs or those likely to lose in the coming period.

Geneva’s multilingual, highly educated professionals possess valuable skills that can be reskilled for the AI era.

Translators and interpreters, for example, can use their linguistic knowledge to contribute to developing and refining Large Language Models, a critical feature of the current AI developments. Lawyers can play a critical role in auditing AI systems to ensure fairness and compliance. Policy professionals and social scientists familiar with organisational dynamics can support developing and deploying practical and effective AI platforms. As ‘micro expertise’ of specific, contextual, and experiential knowledge will gain in relevance as AI becomes more generic, many professions can assist in enriching and contextualising knowledge for their domains. 

AI reskilling can draw on Switzerland’s long tradition of apprenticeships, combining theoretical learning with practical assistance to businesses and organisations in preparing their data and processes for AI transformation. 

AI pedagogy

Integrate AI into educational curricula, from philosophical ethics to practical applications in law, governance, and science, fostering critical thinking alongside technical skills.

In reimagining AI pedagogy, two core dimensions emerge.

First, there is a need to embed AI comprehensively across all educational levels—covering its technological foundations and its legal, ethical, and societal implications—to equip learners with a well-rounded understanding of new technology.

Second and more challenging is the necessity to overhaul teaching methodologies to use AI to foster critical thinking, evidence-based reasoning, and creative problem-solving. This transformation calls for re-evaluating conventional assessment methods; for instance, traditional written assignments should be redesigned to encourage dynamic interaction with AI tools, stimulate innovative idea generation, and help students craft compelling narratives in an AI-driven context.

Micro learning

Acquire specific AI skills through just-in-time micro-pedagogical engagement online and in situ.

Learning is increasingly moving away from traditional classrooms. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok have become prime spots for picking up new skills together with informal engagement with friends and colleagues. To follow this pedagogical shift, Geneva authorities should promote micro-learning through, among others, online tools, casual coffee break discussions, and AI-themed meet-ups.

Expert matching

Overcome thinking and policy silos through personal networks supported by the creative use of AI tools.

Expert matching becomes highly important as AI thrives on interdisciplinary collaboration across a wide range of professional and cultural disciplines. For example, although not tech experts, philosophers and theologians play a critical role in helping AI developers navigate ethical challenges. Boundary spanners, individuals who connect across disparate domains, will be essential in bringing experts together and, even more importantly, sustaining communication and collaboration. Their role becomes even more relevant as professionals work in increasingly specialised and separated scientific and policy fields.

2. Building adaptive organisations for the AI era

Organisational management is on the brink of a profound transformation as AI increasingly automates traditional tasks and processes in management, accounting, and human resources, among other fields. Current practices based on the Taylorian emphasis on industrial efficiency and the Weberian reliance on rigid hierarchies are not optimal for new AI dynamism.

Geneva-based international organisations will be impacted, as AI is likely to flatten traditional hierarchies by equipping employees at all levels—particularly those on the organisational periphery—with real-time data and advanced analytics.

For instance, AI can enable faster lower-level decision-making, by reducing the dependency on top-down directives and enabling a more responsive organisational model. The result will be a hybrid decision-making model that blends human insight with AI-driven precision, a concept increasingly explored in management and organisation field.

Actions

Alleviate compliance pressure and administrative load

Reduce the compliance and reporting requirements on Geneva actors.

For many small NGOs, these requirements pose a crushing burden. By reducing this administrative load, Geneva actors can redirect the already scarce resources to their core missions, ensuring their efficiency and ultimate impact. For example, ICRC and other Geneva-based humanitarian organisations can use AI to reduce bureaucratic burdens (e.g., automating compliance reports) while strengthening their unique human-centred work in the frontline and crisis worldwide.

In addition to a compliance reform, Geneva actors would also benefit from introducing organisational reforms that can streamline workflows through AI-enabled reporting, data analysis, and legal compliance checks.

AI sandboxes for organisational change

Encourage experimental and bottom-up initiatives to test the practical use of AI in the procedures and activities of actors in Geneva. 

AI transformation lacks a one-size-fits-all blueprint, making experimentation essential for tailoring implementations to specific professional and organizational cultures. However, experimentation inherently carries risks. AI sandboxes should be utilized to mitigate these, providing controlled environments where organizations can safely test and refine their AI strategies.

Accountability and transparency

Delineate when and how AI should assist humans in decision-making.

As AI increasingly makes decisions on our behalf, its use must be accountable and transparent. First, AI designers should determine which decisions can be delegated to machines. Second, all AI decisions should be fully transparent. Third, those who deploy AI should always be accountable and responsible for its decisions.

Traceability and diversity

Ensure that AI inferences (answers) can always be traced to sources that should be as diverse as possible.

Organisations and businesses should always understand the reasoning and knowledge sources behind advises and answers provided by AI, which can be ensured through the traceability of the sources and the logic deployed in the reasoning process. In addition, AI sources should be diverse, providing organizations with the necessary diversity of views and positions.

3. Terroir savoir: Codifying, preserving, and sharing Geneva’s knowledge wealth

As knowledge is becoming critical for the AI era, even more than data, Geneva should activate the city’s rich reservoir of knowledge on a wide range of issues, from science to policy and climate protection to humanitarian logistics, to name a few fields. 

So far, this ‘terroir savoir’ (knowledge of the place) remains underutilised, siloed in documents, archives, and tacit know-how of professionals. As part of Geneva’s AI transformation process, focus should be placed on codifying, preserving, and sharing this knowledge as public good for benefit of Geneva and wider communities.  Through the terroir saviour approach, Geneva and other cantons can give new life to the core Swiss principle of subsidiarity in the AI era.

Actions

Codification of explicit knowledge

Use AI to digitise and organise archives from international organisations and academia.

The codification process should be supported by human expertise through data labelling and enriching contextual layers of available knowledge. 

‘Consult ExpriTech de Geneve‘ illustrates how the opus of philosophers, thinkers, and scientists who were born or lived in Geneva can bring different and often creative perspectives to our current challenges.

Overcoming thinking silos

Use AI’s comprehensive coverage to overcome thinking and policy silos within and between organisations.

Recent research shows high fragmentation of the Geneva knowledge scene, with only 0.49% of 94.939.472 hypertext links of 44 websites in International Geneva pointing to resources at other Geneva-based organisations. It means that Geneva-based organisations refer to each other very little in their reports, analyses, and policy documents. AI can help map and connect these knowledge repositories, fostering collaboration across humanitarian, trade, health, and other sectors.

Knowledge linking to local and Swiss AI dynamism

Develop joint projects and activities with Swiss academic, research, and business sectors.

Switzerland boasts a vibrant AI scene, with active participation from both research institutions and business organizations. In Geneva, there is an opportunity to strengthen systemic cooperation with the local AI community, particularly through partnerships with universities such as EPFL and the University of Geneva, as well as with the startup ecosystem, including FONGIT, a prominent startup incubator in Geneva. A critical factor in fostering this cooperation will be cultivating and sustaining creative engagement across professional and institutional boundaries.

4. Walk the talk of human-centred AI governance

Geneva’s AI transformation can do more than rejuvenate the city—it can inspire new approaches to AI governance. Practical actions – anchored in the Red Cross tradition and enriched by thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire – can address growing concerns of the humanities about the impact of AI on the erosion of privacy and our right to choose, monopolisation of knowledge, and even, according to some views, threats to the very existence of humanity. By leveraging its legacy, Geneva can pioneer human-centred AI governance through actions such as:

Actions

Strengthening human rights protection

Protecting core human rights and freedoms from new AI risks and challenges.

AI challenges traditional rights like freedom of thought and expression as technology shapes our choices through algorithms and manipulation of information. In addition to continuing debates on strengthening the applicability of existing human rights frameworks in the context of AI, Geneva-based organisations should also consider revisiting traditional human rights through AI optics.

Protecting human knowledge

Introducing the right to human knowledge by preventing our deprivation from our knowledge syphoned by big AI platforms.

Human knowledge is the foundation of our identity and agency as thinking beings. In an era dominated by AI systems that extract and centralize vast troves of data, the right to safeguard our collective and individual knowledge—including insights, traditions, and cultural heritage—must be prioritised.

Knowledge shapes how we understand the world and define ourselves; its erosion risks undermining humanity’s diversity, autonomy, and future potential. This urgency demands that the human rights community expand its focus to protect knowledge as a pillar of human dignity explicitly, ensuring equitable access and preventing monopolisation by unchecked technological powers.

Protecting core humanity

Exploring new rights to protect our core humanity, such as a right to human imperfection.

Humanity must safeguard its uniqueness—not as competitors to machines’ efficiency, but as beings defined by creativity, ethics, and imperfection. Rather than framing progress as a race against AI, we should ask: What does it mean to thrive as humans in this era? Central to this is reclaiming our right to be imperfect: to err, to evolve, and to exist beyond algorithmic optimization.

Next steps: Actionable strategy 

As AI is becoming affordable commodity, there is no need for huge investment in AI facilities and the development of AI models. Existing open-source tools and platforms can be leveraged smartly to respond to the needs of typical Geneva actors, including international organisations. 

In addition to the above listed actions and overall vision, concrete and targeted action should be supported by the Geneva AI Fund prioritising:

AI Apprenticeship for reskilling of professionals at chômage. This support should be extended to administrative and text-centred professions that are likely to be affected by AU automation.

Master briefings for leaders of organisations to help preparations for forthcoming AI transformation as more change than technological challenge per se.

Human-centred AI projects for local communities, small businesses, schools, and universities in support of developing agents and tools based on local knowledge as part of terroir savoire approach.

Sandbox projects for management and organisational changes for the AI era.

Compliance and reporting AI agents for supporting small NGOs. Experience and expertise from develoment of these AI agents can be gradually extended to bigger organisations.

Events and discussions promoting ‘Geneva approach’ to AI transformation centered around practical action (AI chomage, apprenticeshp, terroire savoire) anchored in deep reflections (humanitarian and philosophical tradition). Such approach would be refreshing in increasingly ‘tired’ AI narratives repeted in hundreds of AI events held in Geneva and worldiwide. In this way Geneva can become not only a venue where governance is discussed but also a ‘lab’ where AI governance solutions are developed and applied.

Geneva AI fund could be managed innovatively using AI and blockchain technologies. Funds could be disbursed in small increments automatically as projects hit milestones (e.g., installing platforms, uploading datasets, training models), cutting red tape while ensuring accountability.

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The current crisis is a rare chance for reinvention. While most geopolitical developments shaping Geneva’s future are beyond the city’s influence, AI transformation is technically feasible, financially affordable, and ethically desirable. It can strengthen Geneva’s humanitarian legacy, democratise its rich knowledge base, and future-proof its workforce and organisations for years to come. 

Don’t waste the crisis!