Ending the Fetish of Corporate Executive Expertise

Why the Public Interest Deserves (Way) Better

When multilaterals, OECD members states or even Global South governments organise tech-related governance events, they too frequently seem to want a corporate executive to headline. The more well known the better. It apparently gives their event an air of legitimacy.

When journalists report on “high-level roundtables” and “public-private dialogues” and “AI conferences,” they almost always report first and foremost the tech executives and business leaders who starred on stage.

It’s as if by virtue of having profitable companies, shareholders, and millions and billions of dollars behind them, they’ve earned the right to define the public interest.

Governments roll out red carpets for “the private sector” — invite them into war rooms, commission them as reserve military officers, and constantly refer to them as the “experts” who will help them transform government and society by harnessing the power of their tech.

Has anyone really bothered to unpack that “expertise”? I’m not diminishing their perspectives – but they are just that: perspectives that ultimately have their private and shareholder interests at heart. They may know technology, but they also know how they want technology to serve their corporate interests, which narratives to run with. And, don’t be fooled, that will always be the perspective their “expertise” serves.

Alright, time to get a little cheeky. Let me ask you this:

When was the last time a civil society organisation unleashed a rapidly scaling product that enabled genocide, undermined elections, or dismantled public trust at scale — all while hoovering up personal data and shredding privacy rights?

And if a civil society group actually did do something like that, would governments still roll out a red carpet for them after they say “oops, sorry” — invite them to panels, treat them as thought leaders, hang on their every word?

Sounds absurd, right?

Yet that’s exactly what happens with tech executives whose products have done just that. Their “mistakes” are brushed off, while their narratives get spotlighted anyway — all while civic tech expertise is at best treated as supplemental, or at worst marginalised, treated as optional rather than essential.

When exactly was the last time you saw governments provide the same fanfare for civil society leaders, independent researchers, or frontline organizers who bring lived experience, deep context, and critical inquiry to the table?

I don’t deny private sector know-how. But I am questioning why that kind of expertise is treated as the gold standard — while civic wisdom is all too often left underfunded, sidelined, and treated like a footnote.

Where I live in Southeast Asia, and across the global majority, we need to curb this enthusiasm. Especially where Northern tech companies’ executives show up with polished narratives and keynote charisma, but little depth in the social, ethical, or political stakes of the technologies they push. And experience has shown us that their tech impacts those in the global majority often very differently – sometimes violently so – than those executives’ “users” in the North.

Let’s be clear: many of these people are terrific corporate leaders and comms professionals. They are brilliant at ingesting narratives shaped by highly paid legal and PR teams and repackaging them as thought leadership. They know how to artfully not answer the tough questions or show genuine introspection when their tech fails. (Also they tend to be the same people who immediately and urgently disparage the whistle blowers - I know this first-hand. Go figure!) I don’t find that to necessarily be public interest expertise — its brand strategy.

And yet, governments and policy influencers continue to fetishise their presence. We confuse polish with substance. It’s the same logic that lets billionaires rewrite space policy, or platform CEOs advise on national security. The executive glow is treated as gospel — no matter how thin the public interest experience underneath.

Meanwhile, civil society keeps doing the hard work: independent inquiry, public accountability, real community-led research — often on a shoestring budget. Just today I saw a global north funder offering US$4,000 micro-grants for South-South research — an amount that would be laughed out of the room in a Northern context. The assumption? Expertise is worth less down here. (Spoiler: it’s not.)

We need to shake things up.

Here’s a proposal: make private sector participation in public discourse expensive. If they want to sit on expert panels or speak at public interest conferences, they should pay — and not a token fee. Tally up the cost of their business class flights, five-star hotels, Ubers, and Michelin-starred dinners. Then double or triple that sum as a participation fee that funds and lifts up civil society experts and compensates their time, flies them in comfortably, gives them the same platform, the same profile, and the same bilateral meetings with senior officials. The same damn respect.

If capitalism makes expertise a pay-to-play game — fine. At least let’s use that system to level the field, not skew it further.

Civil society expertise isn’t just “worthy of inclusion” — it’s often the only counterweight to runaway hype, extractive design, and policy capture. The more we center civil society expertise, the less likely society will tolerate releasing into the wild technology that fails people. And less likely that our policy makers will fall into the trap of leaning too heavily into the corporate narratives (“expert perspectives”) they weave.

To strengthen much needed public interest governance, global south governments need to invest in growing our own civic expertise. That means funding independent think tanks, resourcing community-led research, and building knowledge platforms that support critical inquiry, not just shiny comms and headline-grabbing conferences.

Right now, there’s often a deficit of locally grounded experts — not because the talent doesn’t exist, but because the infrastructure to support it is so thin. Many researchers and civic tech leaders are drawn northward, pulled by funding, opportunities, and access that aren’t available here at home.

Case in point: earlier today, an NGO colleague asked me for suggestions of female civic tech leaders in Southeast Asia based in a particular city. We racked our brains… and came up nearly empty. C’mon — it shouldn’t be that hard! And yet it is, because we haven’t built the infrastructure to surface, support, and sustain these voices. Without it, we can’t counterbalance the power and the fetishised “expertise” of corporate executives.

We need public investment to build a deep bench of civic tech, ethics and governance expertise rooted in our local contexts, and we need it now. Otherwise, governments will keep turning to well-packaged, nicely paid private sector “experts,” not because they’re the best — but because they’re the most visible, most able to pay, most able to show up and most able to bring headlines.

Just this week, we saw a perfect example of this dynamic at the APEC Digital & AI Ministerial Meeting in Incheon, Korea. This governmental gathering was followed by the APEC Global Digital and AI Forum on 5 August, co-hosted by the Government of Korea and the World Bank, billed by APEC itself as an event to “bring together government leaders, innovators and researchers to translate policy commitments into practical action.” The Korea Herald, a newspaper, described the event in its leader as “a forum..to discuss ways to build a more inclusive global community based on digital and artificial intelligence technologies.”

It sounds inclusive — but the event appears to have been bereft of meaningful civil society participation. The showcase panel on “how APEC economies can seize AI technologies” was entirely corporate, headlined by senior executives from Meta, Microsoft, the Canada-ASEAN Business Council, Nvidia and Korean chip maker Rebellions. In a post-event LinkedIn post, one of the corporate panelists praised the “immense potential of AI to drive economic growth” and the role of open-source AI in “unlocking new possibilities.” It was polished, confident, and perfectly in step with corporate narratives about AI as an engine for prosperity.

What was missing? Who was missing?

I’ll tell you who: Civil society technologists. Independent researchers. Public interest advocates who could speak to the governance risks, the lived realities of AI rollouts, and the structural safeguards that actually serve the public. Because they were missing, they posed no threat to the executives’ nicely packaged narratives.

Ah, but APEC is economic you might say. They were talking about economic growth you might say. Civic society would be out of place in a business forum, you might say. Stop being so nonsensical, Michael, you’d say! BUT, alas, frontier digital technology is not neatly and neutrally economic. As I’ve written before, unlike other advancements, digital tools are political.

And here’s why that distinction matters and why we must challenge policymakers to understand their inherent political nature in tandem with the economic, not separate from: because the political demands a higher bar, a higher duty of care, for governance and policymaking — one that draws from a diversity of perspectives, not just corporate visions. As Jamie Susskind writes in Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech,

“states exist to serve the general interest. A well-functioning government generates laws and policies aimed at the common good. By contrast, tech firms, like all private companies operating in a capitalist paradigm, exist for the commercial benefit of their owners.”

Especially where the economic collides with the political, policymakers need to hear from both — and they need to understand the difference. Not on separate panels in separate rooms, but in the same space, at the same time, on equal terms.

From what I’ve been able to decipher, that APEC event was invitation-only and largely limited to corporate players and those in the corporate ecosystem. All too often, conferences are curated for name recognition rather than relevance, and holding a major tech title is seen as a qualification in itself. That lens makes it easy to sideline civic expertise and, TADAA!, also the political questions that impact us as citizens – and disrupt the neatly crafted corporate messages the executive experts convey.

The need for organisations like APEC, the World Bank, the UN, multilaterals, and governments to make an intentional effort to drive genuinely inclusive dialogue – to force the corporate executive experts to spar with civil society experts – is especially critical when the local CSO ecosystem is already underfunded. Governments must be intentional, thoughtful and invest.

For that APEC event, those executives flew into Seoul from Singapore, Washington DC, Toronto, and Redmond (Seattle). My back of the envelope estimates for business class travel averaging, say, $6,000 a piece, hotels at $300/night for let’s say 3 nights, and food allowances (perhaps $120/day) suggests at least $37,000 those executives spent on travel alone. Now think back to those measly micro-grants to civil society for $4,000 each I noted above. (And don’t forget: these execs don’t spend all this money just to join an hour-long panel. No, no no. They expect to have their bilateral discussions with key regulators and policy influencers. That’s just how it works. Pay. To. Play.)

How is this inclusive, equitable, or in the interests of citizens when we face technologies with the biggest impact on freedom, liberty and human agency that we as humanity have ever encountered? Real, genuine, diverse dialogue is needed to interrogate these inherently political technology tools. Not one-sided marketing messages.

So back to my proposal: create a fund for civil society, bankrolled by the pay-to-play expenses of corporate executives. Take just this one APEC example — double or triple their travel and luxury expenditures, and suddenly you’ve got $74,000 to $111,000 to uplift civic tech and civil society expertise. For them, that’s pocket change. For civic tech and civil society leaders trying to inform and shape political and policy spaces in the public interest, it’s game-changing.

Let me also be clear, this isn’t just a quirk of Korean conference culture. It’s a structural feature of global tech governance spaces. Forums like this are presented as “brain trusts” for the regions’ digital future, yet they operate as closed loops between government and corporate executives who bring the “much needed expertise.” They amplify a narrow, growth-first vision of AI while excluding (or marginalising to some side event tucked away in a conference center corner somewhere) the voices best placed to ask and interrogate the harder questions — the very people who would push for accountability, equity, and safeguards.

This, my friends, is the executive expertise fetish in action.

I don’t think we will end this fetish overnight. But we can chip away at it, much like someone trying to quit smoking: little by little.