Doing AI Differently: Executive Summary

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming global infrastructure – shaping decisions in healthcare, education, industry, and everyday life. Yet current AI systems face afundamental limitation: they are shaped by narrow operational metrics that fail to reflect the diversity, ambiguity, and richness of human experience.This white paper presents a research vision that positions interpretive depth as essential to building AI systems capable of engaging meaningfully with culturalcomplexity – while recognising that no technical solution alone can resolve the challenges these systems face in diverse human contexts.We identify a foundational gap: AI systems increasingly produce and act upon cultural outputs – language, images, narratives – yet lack frameworks for interpreting the cultural content they generate and encounter.