Speaking Engagements & Publications

Last updated: 2026-08-14

Shahzad Asghar speaks on applied AI in the United Nations and the public sector, including agentic AI in production, AI governance, sovereign AI strategy, and last-mile delivery. Shahzad Asghar has presented to more than 300 senior officials from 36 UN agencies at UN 2.0 events.

Conference presentations, UN events, and published articles on artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and humanitarian technology.

Speaking Engagements

UN 2.0 Events. Audience: more than 300 senior officials from 36 UN agencies. Topic: AI implementation in humanitarian operations. Presented applied AI projects, including Digital AAP and voice-based feedback systems, to senior United Nations leadership.

Regional Cybersecurity Workshops. Audience: IT and security professionals across the MENA region. Topic: cybersecurity governance and incident response. Designed and delivered institutional cybersecurity training programmes.

UNHCR Innovation Forums. Audience: inter-agency technology coordination teams. Topic: AI, data platforms, and digital transformation in refugee operations. Regular presenter on practical AI implementation in humanitarian field settings.

Speaking Topics

Talks are prepared for one of three audiences: executive leadership deciding where to invest, technical teams building the systems, and governance or risk functions accountable for oversight. Recurring subjects include moving agentic AI from pilot to production, AI governance under the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the EU AI Act, sovereign AI strategy and data residency, AI security and assurance, last-mile delivery in low-connectivity settings, and building AI capability inside a public institution.

Publications

• Last-Mile AI: A Practitioner Framework for Delivering Artificial Intelligence Under Infrastructure, Language, and Governance Constraints. Peer-citable preprint on Zenodo, August 2026, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21921490. Five principles drawn from two decades of United Nations field operations, with three applications from UNHCR Jordan: the interactive voice response appointment system, the DigitalAAP feedback platform, and a data integrity analysis. Download the PDF.
• I Built 3 Agentic AI Systems Inside the UN: What Most Humanitarian Pilots Get Wrong. A first-hand account of three deployed agentic AI systems in UN operations and the delivery lessons most pilots miss. May 2026.
• When 95% of AI's Brain is English, the Rest of the World Pays a Tax. Why language coverage is a last-mile constraint, and what it means for AI serving multilingual populations. June 2026.
• Why Your AI Agent Looks Magical in the Demo and Broken in Production. The gap between demonstration and field deployment, and the engineering discipline that closes it. May 2026.

Further writing appears on Medium and in the blog. Longer applied guides are collected in the playbooks.

Recognition

• UN Global Pulse. DigitalAAP was selected for the UN Global Pulse Accelerator programme, third cohort.
• UN Innovation Network. DigitalAAP is listed in the UN Innovation Library as refugee feedback through AI.
• Measured delivery. Efficiency gains of 83% through the $2.5M Digital Transformation Programme at UNHCR Jordan, 2018 to 2024.
• Partnerships. Microsoft and AWS partnerships generating more than $1M in refugee-centred project funding.

Booking a Talk

Enquiries for keynotes, panels, workshops, and executive briefings go to shahzad.cdcu@gmail.com. Sessions run in person or remotely, and run from a 30-minute briefing to a full-day workshop. For background, see the profile of this AI expert in the United Nations and the project portfolio.