A Note from the Founders

Our Story

01

Where it began

The Conviction

Artificial intelligence (or AI) will affect everyone. Yet the conversation shaping its future remains confined to far too few. The fundamental barrier is not access to institutions or decision-making forums—it is literacy.

Without the knowledge to engage, many voices risk being excluded from one of the defining conversations of our time. AI literacy is the foundation for enabling meaningful stakeholder dialogue on how AI should be developed, deployed, and governed. It was this conviction that inspired us to launch AI Policy Exchange in 2019, as graduate students of public policy at National Law School of India University in Bengaluru.

At the time, conversations about the transformative potential and emerging risks of AI were beginning to gather momentum across the world. Across geographies, however, they remained largely confined to institutional silos and specialised technology and policy circles, often employing language that limited meaningful participation by non-technical stakeholders and the wider public. AI Policy Exchange was conceived as a modest antidote to this trend—an online platform dedicated to making the most pressing discourses on AI policy more accessible, thereby enabling broader and more meaningful stakeholder engagement with one of the defining technologies of our time.

The response exceeded our expectations. Within a short period, AI Policy Exchange brought together contributors from across continents and disciplines, attracted an impressive base of global readership, and established itself as a trusted platform advancing thoughtful and inclusive discourse on AI policy. As the platform grew, so did our ambitions. We began exploring how AI Policy Exchange, supported by its expanding community of contributors, could extend its role beyond publishing to provide practical policy guidance for governments, businesses, and civil society navigating the opportunities and challenges of AI.

02

What followed

The Pause

Our dove-eyed ambitions, however, coincided with a period of profound global uncertainty.

Like many young founders, we were eager to do more than our circumstances realistically allowed. As the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted funding ecosystems and reshaped priorities globally, we found ourselves pursuing an ever-expanding agenda that stretched our limited time and resources. We ultimately stepped away to build our professional careers, and AI Policy Exchange quietly entered a period of dormancy.

In hindsight, however, this period proved invaluable. Although the platform went dormant, the conviction that inspired it never faded. Instead, it continued to shape our professional journeys. Over the following years, we gained firsthand experience of the incentives and constraints shaping AI innovation and adoption, and the institutional realities underpinning AI policy—deepening our understanding of what it would take to shape a prosperous, equitable, and sustainable AI-enabled future.

Above all, the experience taught us an enduring lesson as founders of a public-interest platform: lasting contribution comes not from trying to do everything, but from doing a few things exceptionally well, consistently, and over time. This realisation has brought us back to first principles—to the editorial mission on which AI Policy Exchange was founded.

03

Why we are back

The Revival

The world has changed more profoundly than we could have imagined in 2019.

AI systems that once predicted now create, reason through increasingly complex tasks, and act with growing autonomy. Questions about how they should be governed have moved from the realm of speculative debate to the agendas of cabinet rooms, boardrooms, courtrooms, and international summits. These questions will only become more complex and consequential in the years to come. No single country, institution, discipline, or profession can answer them alone. The need for broad-based and meaningful stakeholder engagement has never been greater; yet it remains the exception rather than the norm.

We believe the moment has come to revive AI Policy Exchange.

We return with a renewed commitment to making the critical conversations that will shape AI’s future more accessible, more informed, and more inclusive. While broadening how we engage through new formats, deepening community engagement, and strengthening our editorial and collaborative foundations, we remain firmly anchored to the mission that inspired AI Policy Exchange from the very beginning: advancing universal AI literacy and fostering broad-based, meaningful stakeholder dialogue on AI policy for a prosperous, equitable, and sustainable AI-enabled future.

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