At the Eurasian Economic Forum in Astana, Kazakhstan presented its artificial intelligence ecosystem.
During the panel session titled
“Artificial Intelligence and the New Paradigm of Competition: Threat or Driver
of the Development of Cross-Border EAEU Markets?”, профильные ministers and deputy ministers from
the Union countries — Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan — discussed
the impact of technology on global competition, sovereignty, and data
protection.
During the session, Vice Minister
Dmitry Moon of the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace
Industry of Kazakhstan presented important data showing that the sovereign
national AI platform has already been deeply integrated into practice: civil servants
have used it more than 1 million times for routine tasks, while citizens have
used it more than 2.5 million times when receiving public services and working
with the digital assistant for public procurement. However, Kazakhstan’s
current main priority is to bring AI into the real sector of the economy. To
achieve this, a detailed conceptual data atlas has been developed, containing
more than 7,000 parameters. At the same time, while the level of digitalization
in the social sector, healthcare, and education reaches 80–95%, there is still
a shortage in the real sector: about 40% of data in industry has been
digitized, and only 26% along the line of the Ministry of Agriculture.
To solve this problem, Kazakhstan
proposed that the EAEU countries join efforts and launch a network of joint AI
laboratories based at universities in order to share depersonalized industry
data. This would make it possible to jointly train open small language models
capable of operating locally, without the internet or supercomputers, directly
in factories or on farms.
Speaking about this initiative,
Dmitry Moon emphasized: “A key priority for us is high-quality economic growth
through the integration of artificial intelligence. To train effective models,
we need large volumes of data that reflect regional specifics, our climate
conditions, and sector-specific nuances. In this regard, it would be advisable
to organize the mutual exchange of depersonalized data on key industries among
our countries. This will allow us to quickly create open industrial models, and
through joint efforts we will be able to achieve serious progress in this
area.”
The idea of cooperation and division
of labor was actively supported by other participants in the discussion. Deputy
Minister of Communications and Informatization of the Republic of Belarus
Kirill Zalessky noted that the EAEU countries need synchronized regulation and
common technological security standards so that cross-border data circulation
is not blocked by barriers. He agreed that the AI needs of all Union member
states are largely similar, and therefore distributing the workload by sector —
where one country develops models for education and another for medicine or
manufacturing — would significantly reduce budget costs. As a pilot economic
sector for AI implementation, the Belarusian representative proposed logistics,
where large amounts of structured data have already been accumulated.
First Deputy Minister of High-Tech
Industry of the Republic of Armenia Gevorg Mantashyan proposed focusing AI
technologies around the basic EAEU principles of the free movement of goods and
services. He supported the creation of specialized AI assistants for
cross-border trade that would help businesses and the Commission identify
errors in documents and speed up customs procedures without endlessly expanding
staff numbers. At the same time, the Armenian speaker openly identified the
main managerial risk of integration: the unwillingness of some agencies within
countries to adapt effective ready-made solutions developed by colleagues
because of their own parallel agendas.
Azamat Japarov, Director of the
Tunduk State Institution under the Presidential Administration of the Kyrgyz
Republic, also emphasized the importance of developing common rules of the
game. In his view, the Commission should give top priority to the protection of
state data, algorithm transparency, and AI ethics, while also ensuring digital
sovereignty: each participant must retain control over its own data while being
able to exchange it securely within joint projects and shared centers of
competence.
As one of the first quick wins for
citizens and business, Kazakhstan proposed launching a joint pilot project — an
AI assistant in the legal sphere, where all EAEU countries’ laws have already
been digitized. Such an assistant would help citizens quickly navigate the
rules in their own language when crossing borders, explain to businesses in
simple terms the specifics of opening companies and taxation in any Union
country, and help the Eurasian Economic Commission automatically identify
contradictions when amendments are made to supranational acts.
Kazakhstan’s initiative to
distribute work among countries and create unified data security standards
received strong support from colleagues in Armenia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan.
They agreed on the need to overcome interdepartmental barriers in order to
build strong technological sovereignty for the EAEU.
It is worth noting that Kazakhstan
has been consistently building a full-fledged AI infrastructure and is already
leading Central Asia in this field. The Smart Data Ukimet platform became the
foundation for building a data-driven state, while transparent rules for
investors and developers were закреплены in the new Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan
“On Artificial Intelligence.” Technological sovereignty has been reinforced by
the launch of two powerful supercomputer clusters based on NVIDIA H200 chips —
alem.cloud and AI-Farabi — which entered the global TOP500 ranking. At the same
time, human capital is also being actively developed through Tomorrow School,
Tumo, AI Sana, and other educational programs.
Source: https://www.gov.kz/memleket/entities/maidd/press/news/details/1230138?lang=ru