The Power of Context: Microsoft Features the Fellowship Voices
On 16 September 2025, Microsoft’s Corporate Responsibility site published The power of context: Embracing global perspectives to foster meaningful AI adoption. The piece carried short video profiles of four Global Perspectives Fellowship participants — Narun Popattanachai (Thailand), Jibu Elias (India), Branka Panic (AI for Peace), and Aziz Soltobaev (Kyrgyzstan) — each speaking to the question of how AI adoption looks from inside their own context rather than the contexts where the systems were designed.
The Kyrgyzstan contribution focused on what mobile-first adoption actually means on the ground. Most digital adoption conversations assume the user starts at a desktop, with a broadband connection, and a working pattern shaped by office software. In Bishkek and across the country, that assumption does not hold. Connectivity arrived through phones, commerce migrated to messaging apps and Instagram, and the working pattern that emerged is its own — not a deficient version of someone else’s. The argument carried into the AI conversation: systems designed around desktop assumptions land differently in a country whose digital life has been mobile from the beginning.
The premise of the Microsoft piece was that AI adoption is shaped by the conditions of the place it lands in, and that those conditions need to be heard from people who live inside them. The four featured contributions were selected to make that point concrete.
→ Read the feature: Microsoft Corporate Responsibility — The power of context
→ Earlier in the same arc: Advancing AI Responsibly — Microsoft Unlocked publication (January 2024)
Aziz Soltobaev featured in The power of context, published 16 September 2025 on Microsoft’s Corporate Responsibility site: microsoft.com. Co-featured: Narun Popattanachai, Jibu Elias, Branka Panic.