Civic Welcome by The Depute Lord Provost Bailie Christy Mearns representing the Lord Provost’s office

Session details forthcoming.

Anchored in the Seoul Statement on Artificial Intelligence, this panel explores how Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) are turning shared global principles into coordinated, practical action for responsible AI. Adopted at the International AI Standards Summit in Seoul in December 2025, the Statement reaffirmed a collective commitment to developing human‑centred, safe, inclusive, and effective international AI standards. This session shines a spotlight on the people across global, regional, and national SDOs who are delivering on those commitments, particularly around inclusion and practical deployment.

Session details forthcoming.

With the development of harmonised standards for the EU AI Act entering the finishing stretch, the focus of AI standardisation is broadening from trustworthiness and risk mitigation towards quality, including performance. This has the potential to boost market transparency and thus competition as a driver of innovation but also presents the challenge of standardising meaningful metrics across a plethora of domains and use cases. This talk outlines the transition to AI quality as the next frontier, the current state of play, and the gradual reflection in the standardisation landscape.

AI evaluation is highly context specific. Risks and performance requirements vary across sectors, applications and deployment environments. This makes national approaches to testing and assurance, and their international alignment, particularly important.

This panel will examine how different countries are developing frameworks for testing and assuring AI systems. It will look at national strategies, regulatory requirements and the technical methods used to support safe and trustworthy AI.

Panellists will outline their countries’ approaches, highlighting early lessons, emerging good practice and the challenges of aligning standards across borders. The session will also consider opportunities for international cooperation to improve interoperability and support responsible innovation.

Each panellist will give a five-minute overview of their national TEVV approach, followed by a moderated discussion.

This interactive session examines how AI assurance is being implemented in practice today, where gaps persist between expectations and reality, and what is needed to build a credible, effective, and globally aligned AI assurance ecosystem.

It will bring together perspectives from across the AI assurance ecosystem, including third-party assurance providers, AI developers, and deploying organisations, to explore:

• What credible AI assurance looks like in practice today
• Where existing standards and frameworks are helping and where gaps remain
• What capabilities and mechanisms are most urgently needed to strengthen trust and comparability in AI assurance, and how these can be enabled by technical testing.

This session is designed as an evidence-gathering and sense-making exercise, combining expert insights with structured audience input to surface common challenges, gaps, and priorities across sectors.

Traditional AI systems typically generate outputs that humans then interpret and act on, so technical evaluation—accuracy, bias, robustness—captures much of what matters. But as AI systems become more autonomous, embedded, and influential, evaluation must expand beyond technical performance. It needs to account for the people who deploy these systems, the communities they affect, the institutional and regulatory contexts they operate within, and the assumptions embedded in data, model design, and implementation choices.

Taking this socio-technical approach calls for collaboration across disciplines and meaningful engagement with end-users and other key stakeholders, so that emerging metrics, standards, and regulation reflect real-world conditions and consequences.

Delivered by Responsible Ai UK, this workshop will bring together experts in AI and applied AI from across the UK to examine evaluation challenges across multiple sectors, including law enforcement, healthcare, and cultural heritage. Leads from major projects will present scenarios, research questions, and early findings from their work. Interactive roundtables will then involve participants in identifying shared concerns and practical priorities, helping to shape recommendations for policymakers, researchers, and industry.

AI and AI-powered technologies are now embedded across everyday life and work, from monitoring consumer sleep patterns to shaping employee decision making and organisational strategy. Yet much of today’s human–AI collaboration happens without sufficient awareness, skills, or mechanisms to question, contest, or meaningfully engage with AI outputs. This interactive session explores how AI standards and standards literacy can play a critical role in building human capacity to collaborate with AI systems responsibly and effectively. Grounded in the vision of Industry 5.0, the session brings together diverse perspectives to examine how skills development, education, and standards can empower humans not just to use AI, but to understand, govern, and coexist with it in ways that are fair, sustainable, human-centric, and resilient.

The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence across public and private sectors is reshaping how decisions are made about people’s lives, opportunities, and access to services. While AI systems offer significant potential for innovation and efficiency, they also raise serious concerns about the amplification of existing inequalities, the entrenchment of systemic bias, and the erosion of fundamental human rights.

This interactive session explores the intersection of human rights and artificial intelligence, examining how AI technologies can affect individual rights such as equality, non-discrimination, dignity, privacy, and access to remedy. The session will critically assess whether existing legal, regulatory, and standards frameworks are sufficient to protect these rights in the context of increasingly advanced AI systems.

Central to the discussion is the Seoul statement, agreed at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, which positions AI safety, innovation, and inclusivity as interdependent goals and calls for enhanced international cooperation to promote human-centric AI and human rights. Drawing on diverse perspectives from ethics, industry, philosophy, civil society, and standards development, the session will explore how the principles of the Seoul Declaration can be operationalised through standards, governance mechanisms, and international collaboration.

Session details forthcoming.

Session details forthcoming.

This session will explore the invisible global framework of standards, conformity assessment, metrology, accreditation and market surveillance which underpins the quality and safety of products and services across the economy. It will examine how these elements are crucial to the development of a safe and secure AI assurance framework and look specifically at how the collaborative work of the AIQI Consortium is using the global quality ecosystem to develop a secure, safe and ethical AI governance framework.

An evening celebration with entertainment, drinks and street food