This month I experienced a new country and a new environment as I took our AI Narratives research to Dubai for the World Government Summit. I had the privilege to chair a session on underrepresented narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, hosted at the WGS. We discussed what kind of narratives dominate around AI, who is telling them, whose voices aren’t being heard and, most importantly given the purposes of the event, developed five policy recommendations in order to redress some of the inequities we’d identified. After the GGAR, I experienced the rest of the WGS, primarily attending sessions on either AI, or on women and leadership. The latter were particularly inspiring, from hearing Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of New Zealand) talk about her experiences of national leadership, to listening to Sarah Al Amiri (the UAE’s Minister of State for Advanced Sciences) share her story of scientific endeavour and leadership. It certainly did not feel natural being a humanities academic in such a policy-focused and political environment, but I was not the only one there and we all shared a common belief in the increasing importance of the presence of humanities scholars in these kinds of spaces. The benefits are reciprocal: we bring knowledge and skills that others present do not; but we also learn from interacting outside of our comfortable environments – it is challenging to one’s sense of established norms and values, but sometimes we need these to be challenged in order to reaffirm, or adjust them, in the context of an ever-changing world.