MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita has been appointed a founding commissioner of the AI for Good Global Commission, a new United Nations-linked body that puts the head of Africa’s biggest mobile operator alongside the CEOs of Nvidia, Amazon and Salesforce in the most senior AI governance forum yet assembled.
The commission, an initiative of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, was launched last Thursday and is co-chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, with ITU secretary-general Doreen Bogdan-Martin as vice chair. It brings together more than 40 founding members from government, business and international organisations, charged with expanding digital access, strengthening trust and accelerating economic impact through responsible AI.
“It’s an honour to be one of the founding commissioners of the AI for Good Global Commission,” Mupita said in a statement on Monday. “At MTN Group, we believe that the developments in AI have the potential to advance health, education, food security and industrial productivity. AI must be safe, ethical and globally inclusive. These perspectives align fully with the work of this global commission.”
Mupita joins a heavyweight roster. Founding members include Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Microsoft president Brad Smith, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez, alongside the presidents of Estonia and Iceland, ArcelorMittal executive chairman Lakshmi Mittal, African Union infrastructure commissioner Lerato Mataboge and policymakers from Kazakhstan, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Nigeria. Notably absent from the founding list are OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta.
A key focus of the commission will be bridging the digital divide: 2.2 billion people worldwide remain offline, cutting a quarter of the world’s population off from AI’s advances — a challenge squarely in MTN’s wheelhouse given its footprint across African markets where fewer than 30% of people access the internet. The body builds on the ITU/Unesco Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, which helped shape global priorities for connectivity and digital inclusion.
Packed week
The commission’s inaugural meeting takes place this week at the ITU’s AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, part of a packed week of digital governance events that also includes the first UN-mandated Global Dialogue on AI Governance.
Watch: Ralph Mupita on competition, AI and the future of mobile
The appointment aligns with MTN’s own AI ambitions. One of the group’s strategic priorities under its Ambition 2030 strategy is to “leverage AI for growth”, targeting R30-billion in value creation from AI over the next three to five years — roughly half from using AI to run the business more efficiently, with the balance split between consumer and business applications. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
- Subscribe to TechCentral’s daily newsletter
- Get breaking news alerts on WhatsApp
