At the AIFOD Geneva Summit 2026, held from 12–14 August at the Assembly Hall of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Switzerland, under the theme “Small Takes the Lead”, Dr. Carmen Z. Lamagna, Board Member and Former Vice Chancellor of the American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB), was interviewed by the summit’s official body on two important themes: what Bangladesh can take from the summit-  the key lessons and opportunities emerging from the summit for Bangladesh, and AIUB’s own experience in leading an AI transformation. Her reflections brought together the broader lessons and opportunities for Bangladesh with AIUB’s institutional journey, highlighting how visionary leadership can help shape meaningful transformation in higher education and position the university to respond proactively to the evolving role of artificial intelligence.

On Bangladesh’s Path Forward

Asked what Bangladesh could carry home from three days of dialogue in Geneva, Dr. Lamagna said the single biggest takeaway was a sense of urgency paired with possibility - that the countries furthest from the center of the global AI conversation are, in this moment, the ones with the most to gain by acting decisively rather than waiting to be included.

On what Bangladesh should prioritize first, she pointed to building local capacity before chasing infrastructure - investing in people, curricula, and research culture so that when computing power and funding do arrive, there is a generation ready to use them well.

When the conversation turned to collaboration between government, industry, and academia, Dr. Lamagna described it as the missing link in most developing-country AI strategies. She argued that universities cannot transform a nation’s AI readiness alone, and neither can policy or private capital in isolation - the three have to move together, with universities supplying the talent pipeline, industry supplying real-world problems worth solving, and government supplying the regulatory clarity that lets both move with confidence.

Asked specifically where institutions like AIUB fit into that picture, she said universities in the Global South have a responsibility to go beyond teaching AI as a subject and instead model what responsible adoption actually looks like - in how they teach, how they run their own operations, and how openly they share what they learn with peer institutions.

Her message to policymakers back home was direct: the countries that will lead the next decade of AI are not necessarily the ones with the largest models, but the ones that move fastest to build homegrown expertise, protect their languages and data, and stay in the room where these decisions are being made - which is exactly why she believes Bangladesh’s continued presence at forums like AIFOD matters.

On Leading AI Transformation at AIUB

Turning to AIUB’s own journey, Dr. Lamagna traced the university’s transformation back to its founding principles - an institution that grew from just 50 students to more than 15,000 today by staying deliberately close to industry needs rather than treating the curriculum as fixed. She said that same instinct made the shift toward AI feel less like a disruption to manage and more like a natural continuation of how AIUB had always operated.

Asked about the leadership lessons that stood out most, she pointed to the importance of moving early but not alone - bringing faculty, industry partners, and students into the process of change together, rather than imposing a strategy from the top and hoping it would take hold.

On the challenges AIUB had to work through, Dr. Lamagna was candid that resistance to change is rarely about the technology itself - it is about people’s confidence that they will still have a meaningful role once technology is in place. She said AIUB’s approach was to invest heavily in faculty training and reassurance alongside the technical rollout, so that AI was introduced as a tool that extended what people could do rather than a replacement for them. That transformation is also supported by a growing research infrastructure. AIUB’s AI Supercomputing Lab, with 40 NVIDIA DGX Spark systems and 128 GB of unified memory per system, provides substantial computing capacity for AI research and large-scale workloads, including machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal and generative AI, and work toward Bangla Large Language Models. This is complemented by AIUB’s Cyber Security and Digital Forensics Laboratory, which brings AI capabilities into cybersecurity through areas such as adversarial machine learning, AI security, threat analysis, malware analysis, and model-integrity validation. Together, these capabilities strengthen AIUB’s capacity not only to use AI, but to research, develop, secure, and responsibly apply AI technologies. These facilities form part of AIUB’s broader and well-established laboratory ecosystem, encompassing advanced AI and cybersecurity facilities alongside specialized engineering, computing, and discipline-specific laboratories that support hands-on learning, applied research, and emerging technologies across the university.

Asked how AIUB measures whether the transformation is actually working, she pointed less to any single metric and more to a shift in culture - faculty and students who now reach for AI tools naturally in research and coursework, and industry partners who increasingly come to AIUB looking for graduates who already know how to work alongside these systems.

Asked, finally, what advice she would offer other universities across the Global South considering a similar path, Dr. Lamagna said the case study is less about the specific tools AIUB adopted and more about the sequence - start with people, build trust before you build infrastructure, and treat every stage of the transformation as something to be shared openly, since institutions like AIUB only move as fast as the wider ecosystem around them.

Dr. Carmen Z. Lamagna’s reflections at the AIFOD Geneva Summit 2026 highlight AIUB’s journey of forward-looking leadership, strong research and laboratory capabilities, and a commitment to preparing its people for technological change - positioning the university not simply to adopt AI, but to help shape how AI can contribute to the future of higher education in Bangladesh and beyond.