How are digital technologies affecting youth globally? In what ways do they experience and envision the harms and benefits of artificial intelligence (AI)? How can we create digital futures that truly serve and respect younger generations? These are questions that parents, lawmakers, and civil society groups around the world are wrestling with every day. But, too often, critical voices are missing from the conversation — the youth themselves. For the last several years, I’ve been on a quest to answer these questions by engaging with young people through the initiative JAAKLAC, a nonprofit devoted to digital education. Here’s what I’ve learned: The digital ecosystem affects the lives and futures of children and young people in different ways. However, local and global digital agendas privilege adults’ interests and economic growth as main drivers. In dialogue with youth from around the world, their visions on the positive impact of tech on our health, economy, and social development have broadened my perspectives. I have also been inspired by their strategies to harness digital technologies for advocacy applied to solve local and global problems. For the purpose of this article, we invited George Vella, Umi Said, and Sandra Ruhizi from Malta, Kenya, and Tanzania, respectively, to speak about their interactions with AI technologies. They are civically engaged around issues of sexual and reproductive education, mental health, farmer women empowerment, and child counseling on the use of technologies for community advancements. When asking them to co-write this article, we shared some prompts to discuss the main views, concerns, and ideas for better digital societies. Digital technologies and AI are developing at a fast pace, becoming more advanced every single day. These are relevant as they occur alongside an exponentially growing population, provide accuracy in handling documents and data, and easing human labor. For instance, with the integration of AI and digital technologies, young people accessing health services would be able to get them at a fast rate, considering that records will be stored in devices that are accessible online. This also helps young people in accessing services from where they are or where they want with minimal or no risk of stigma. For example, During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was hard for young people to seek sexual and reproductive health services as interaction was minimal with lockdowns in most places. Technology helped to ensure that those critical services were available from where a person was. In Kenya, One2One website under the LVCT Health nonprofit enabled young people to seek knowledge on different matters such as gender-based violence, mental health, menstruation, love, and HIV. The website accommodated online users while there were also free phone text messages, chatbots, and calls for those without internet. The website also provided a certified counselor to interact with young people, as per the method they chose, either messaging or calls. Other youth benefits from AI regard schools having less work as technology could be programmed to do some heavy tasks such as marking students’ tests or even training skills in a live session. Moreover, with the introduction of AI in more public activities, such as voting online, it would encourage more people to participate. Services being provided by the government would also be enhanced to be more people-friendly I tend to be quite conservative when it comes to digitizing elections at all, let alone trusting AI with the very important democratic task that elections are. Voting online, whilst it would be more convenient, can also create a vast number of problems. As a Maltese person, where an 85 percent voter turnout was seen as a dangerously low number in our last election, I believe that people tend to trust the system more when everyone can see the sealed boxes being moved to a counting hall and volunteers counting the actual ballots. How would you explain to the everyday person why they should trust AI or end-to-end encryption? To break an election, you don’t need to physically break it — you just need to cast enough doubt on the results. For example, with deep fakes and AI voices becoming quite convincing is something that makes me feel quite uncomfortable. This just shows how lawmakers and policymakers need to act quickly or risk being too late on legislation regarding AI. Digital technology has led to many great innovations in my country and the whole world. Through AI, technology helps doctors identify viruses and also treat people with cancer and other diseases.