The Startup Albania platform marks an important step in the development of the startup ecosystem in Albania, offering support through digital education, the promotion of startups, and efficient, transparent interaction. It features a public portal providing information on the startup ecosystem, services, events, and online courses designed to build entrepreneurial skills.
The presentation also featured the participation of Minister of Economy Delina Ibrahimaj and Professor William Barnett, Director of the Stanford University Executive Programme.
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Prime Minister Edi Rama:
It’s a privilege, Professor, to have you here with us on this nice day for this community where, as you saw, the Minister launched a product that we are preparing for some time together with a digital-oriented company about the transparency and the accuracy of the competitive process for the government’s grants. But at the same time, this is just one very small part of the whole mosaic that we are trying to bring together in close relation, I would say, with this community.
One of the things that we are going to materialize very soon is what we already agreed in a long day we had with several people that are here, but others that are not here, representing this community, which will be a National Council for Innovation that will practically be like the Parliament for the stakeholders to deal with the government and to share ideas and concerns and to propose solutions.
The other thing that we are very eager to go for is an accelerator that will support our State Minister for Artificial Intelligence, which is an artificial intelligence person, for spreading and pushing all over the government’s space and network the power of AI, and we see this accelerator as a joint venture, as a common work between AI engineers that work for the public sector and engineers that come from the private sector, and we want to give to everyone the possibility to work with anonymized data and to come out with solutions for every sector and support the transformation of every ministry and every agency in an AI-oriented practice.
Finally, we are very much aware that the biggest problem of this community, not here in Albania only, but all over, is the bureaucracy. So, we want to make a very important step forward and eliminate as much as possible bureaucratic obstacles for the enterprises and everyone that works in this field, starting from the permissions of residents and permissions of work for talents that they bring from abroad to the all-over rules that they must apply.
So I think that there is a very clear idea and a very strong conviction on both sides about the necessity to work together and to join forces, and on our side of the government, we are very much aware that we cannot overcome the obstacles and we cannot reach new heights if we rely only on our public sector human resources. So, we need to embrace the whole spectrum and to give full access to everyone and work together for mutual interest and mutual benefits.
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I believe that we have to never forget in any day of our existence that this time has come with a big bless for countries like ours that have suffered so much in the past and without the technology, the new technology and the digital technology and the artificial intelligence would have had crazy difficulties and would have needed I don’t know how many times to catch up with the other countries.
So, in the era of linear progress, we were doomed to remain far behind. But with technology, the chances of exponential progress have come. So, we can make leapfrog by simply accepting that blessing and by not being afraid to try. And going back to what you said in your first intervention, we inherited a situation where it was very difficult to understand and let alone then to react to the fact that for just a birth certificate, people had to spend a lot of time, stay in the queue for hours and at the end even pay a bribe to get that paper that sometimes was missing because the person there would say, sorry, we are out of paper or we are out of printer ink. Or to stay in line for hours and to stay in line even under the rain to pay for the electricity bill.
So, what could we do if we would not have had the chance to live in an era where we could rely to the digital platform and to transform a country of queues and of bribe in every step in a country where 95% of the public services are delivered in your smartphone and you don’t need even to move from your chair to get 95% of the documents that the state provides.
We haven’t yet solved, for example, online marriage because you need to witness this, you need to say yes in person and things like that, but maybe it will happen.
William Burnet: Can you have online divorce as well?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: Divorces, I believe, and I had some. Divorces are easier because they are made through WhatsApp and then they are formalized in the court of law, but marriage is more difficult. So, it’s the blessing of technology and the AI now gives us new opportunities. The point is how to create a space where everyone that is here in this room or others that are not here in this room are in the front of innovation and of new ideas, have access and use the data, that is a big treasure for developing AI, for the mutual interests of their own and of the country.
So, this is our challenge now and this is what we will try to do and try to also connect this start-up Albania thing with governing Albania through artificial intelligence and I’m sure that we will have a lot of fun and we’ll have a lot of great results if we succeed to create a mechanism that will bring together, as the minister said, the start-uppers, the companies and the government through its own agencies.
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The curious fact is that humans never change and what I learned from the minister we are talking about, and I didn’t know that, but when we asked her to make her speech in the parliament, she came out with this crazy thing, I didn’t know that when electricity was invented the parliaments at that time didn’t accept it, they said electricity is not lawful, candles are lawful.
So, the parliaments, MPs at that time, decided to keep going with candles and to disallow electricity to light the parliament building and it was her that came out with that. So somehow, it’s a pity because these people leave themselves on record and leave themselves even in video by doing exactly what the MPs of that era did against electricity. There were protests in parliaments to not light the parliament building with electricity and on the other hand it’s also a lot of misunderstanding, not necessarily refusal based on arguments, because as I have followed some of the controversies, people that have a different opinion which is legitimate don’t understand one thing, that the AI minister will not make decisions for us, we will make the decisions.
So, we are not delegating the responsibility to govern or the responsibility to make the final decision. We are simply giving her the responsibility to do what she does better than us. And what she does better than us is to process data very fast and to give us very fast answers. What was presented here, the Startup Albania platform which was created by a company here is the same logic.
So, it’s a platform that will process all the applications from the startups to get a grant not through our bureaucracy but through artificial intelligence and everyone will follow the destiny of his or her application in a very transparent manner, and everyone will be able to see who won, who didn’t win and what the winners had more than he or she that did not win.
So practically it’s a very simple thing. The capacity to process with no constraints related to what humans have as a constraint. Starting from the big constraint that the bureaucracy, by physiology, is a beast that the easiest word it uses is no. So, it’s always a no that must become a yes. It’s not a yes that has to become a yes; while she never says no, she doesn’t go to sleep, she doesn’t ask lunchtime pause,
Listen, I have appointed 16 ministers, and I don’t know how many from the day one, maybe 70. But no one was subject of any international media. This one is subject of every international media. So, I got, and don’t exaggerate, five, six requests per day from all over the world to talk about her. So, it has hit all the papers, all the portals, all TVs, all over the world. So, something might be there. I don’t think it’s completely stupid.
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I wanted to ask the Prime Minister regarding also your earlier example and analogy about the electricity and candles. How do you think that this strategic move into AI-powered government grows state capacity in the years ahead? And can this model be replicated closely by other governments in the world or Europe?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: I’m 100% sure that very soon, sooner more than later at least, AI ministers will not be any more news, you know? So, for sure we have stolen the news, and it will come. And it’s not just the fact that it does certain processes, but it’s even more important, the psychological pressure that it exercises humans to run and to deliver.
So, I’m convinced that many of the things that we today ask humans to do will be done by AI, and this is not something new, and the sky is the limit. We must simply push and push and push. Then not everything will be fully successful, but I’m sure that most of it will be successful.
We are working now, and I believe next spring we can have her here with us and you can ask her questions. So, it will be really a presence with knowledge and with the capacity to react and with the capacity to debate and with the capacity to tell us things that we don’t know. Because it’s being capacitated with huge knowledge in every moment.
So, we are taking her in government meetings, we’re taking her in parliaments, for the moment not visible, and very soon she will go to, in TV and talk to the journalists.
So, what’s next? For sure the capacity too, but at the end I want to repeat, you can delegate power to execute. What you can’t delegate is the power to take the decision out of the democratic process. Until the day when the people will make a referendum and will say, we want AI parliaments. I’m sure that Professor is young, he will see that day, but not me, and you certainly have to think about that day and decide what side you’ll take. But at least for the moment the power to execute of the AI, it’s incomparable with the power to execute of people. It’s not possible. And it will become increasingly powerful. People must be good to lead AI in good directions and to lead the AI for the right purposes, because at the end I believe that no AI can compete with the evil within humans when it comes to do something bad and no AI can compete with the grace of a human being when it comes to the good.
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One more question here is directed to the Professor and then also to the Prime Minister because I think it’s going to be a big challenge for the next four years for the government, and our government as well. So also taking into consideration electricity, which is one of the largest technological transformations in history. Another one is the printing press which took a lot of years, many decades to make people realize that information will not be sent via letters anymore but there will be a printing press.
So, coming from another technology background which is the blockchain side, you Professor you have worked with a lot of foolish people I guess in AI but also in blockchain because blockchain is also a very big technology. And my question is what do you think about the idea of combining AI with blockchain, intelligence with transparent systems of trust that could also allow governments, of course Albania is a first mover in this thing, first country in the world but also other governments to leapfrog small governments, small countries to leapfrog and position itself at the forefront of governments, finance but also digital infrastructures for anything?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: Going to a democratization, I want to bring an example which is amazing. It’s an example of how AI can impact the life of people. I don’t know how familiar you are, but around 70% of the buildings in the world are built by non-architects. So, people build. It’s not just us.
Of course, in Stanford they have architects, but in many parts of the world people build. And we know very well how difficult it is for many people to hire an architect to build their house. And this is how and why a lot of houses are built like that, you know, just built. And they are not good enough for many reasons and they can even be dangerous, as we saw when the earthquake happened.
So, an Albanian guy who was with us in this beautiful day we had with the people from the startups and innovation sector, has invented the first AI platform with vectors, which we will have the privilege to launch here in Tirana. He is in Vienna with a team, and he will launch it, and it will be in the market. A platform to build for everyone. I’ve seen it. It’s magic. It’s incredible. So, you want to build your house, and you just give the instructions. If you can do a very naïve drawing, it’s fine, but you can write and you say I want a house that is related to a tradition of the houses of the north, Albania, or of the houses of Chile, whatever, and you don’t have to go through a very expensive process, hiring architects, paying for this and paying for that, but you can simply have the house in your computer and apply in the municipality and get the permission, and this is a real thing that in October will be in the hands of everyone. It’s amazing.
What it does, professor, it eliminates, and this is crazy, it eliminates 95% of the work that people do in an architecture practice. It’s crazy. It will make the architects less expensive, which is also a good thing. So, you are right, there is so much that AI can do for democratization that is amazing.
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My question is simple: as the leader and founder of an AI community that brings together the best AI experts in the country—as well as Data Science specialists, including the diaspora—my question, prompted by the recent initiative with the Minister of AI, is this: has there been consideration, or will there be, for creating space for the wider “Data Science” community in Albania to contribute, in order to improve and enhance the services offered by the AI Ministry? Thank you.
Prime Minister Edi Rama: I said from the beginning that we want to support the AI Minister with an accelerator, and the accelerator cannot be a group of people hired by the government, but should be a group, a mixed group of people hired by the government and of people coming from the private sector.
So you are more than welcome to kidnap the Minister for whatever you need, and it’s a pleasure to introduce you to these guys, because they have done something amazing, an AI solution for several ports in the United States, and I think the President of the United States should award them because they are contributing to his agenda of fighting illegal drugs entering the United States, and we are going to take them also for our ports to help us in managing, but of course it’s a big pleasure to have you as part of this journey and to have your talent backing our Minister. It’s a very big pleasure.
Thank you.
