<p>The well-being consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) are neither automatic nor uniform across societies. This study asks whether the association between AI development and national quality of life (QOL) depends on the quality of a country’s governance. Using a panel of 138 countries observed from 2012 to 2023, we estimate two-way fixed-effects models that interact a measure of national AI development with a World Bank governance measure, drawing QOL from validated World Happiness Report indicators of life evaluation and emotional experience. Two patterns stand out. Taken on its own, AI development is weakly negatively associated with QOL across the panel. The association becomes more positive, however, as governance quality rises, turning from negative and statistically significant in weakly governed countries to positive in point estimates in the upper part of the governance distribution. This conditioning pattern is stable across lagged specifications, alternative constructions of the AI measure, and a randomisation check. Subsample analyses by income and period are exploratory and inconclusive. We interpret these results as observational evidence that governance quality may act as an enabling condition through which AI investment is translated into broad-based well-being, a finding with direct implications for how AI policy is developed across different institutional settings.</p>