Human-Centric AI for Digital Accessibility: Agency, Inclusion, and the Future of Interfaces

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American AI scientist, entrepreneur and investor whose life’s work has focused on humanizing technology—pioneering Emotion AI out of MIT and setting a global standard for the ethical development and deployment of AI. In this talk, Rana brings that same human-centric lens to one of the most urgent frontiers in tech: digital accessibility.

AI can be a force multiplier for inclusion—powering code generation, accessibility testing, translation across modalities, and interfaces that adapt to individual needs rather than forcing “one-size-fits-all” experiences. But it can just as easily amplify bias and exclusion, especially when models learn from an internet that is still largely inaccessible.

As agentic AI begins more and more mainstream, Rana explores what it will take to build accessibility into the AI era from the ground up: richer semantics, multimodal pathways, and personalization that preserves human agency. The north star is simple: technology should expand independence and dignity, and the choice of how we interact must stay with the human.