The Second Innovation Forum was held today, focusing on Artificial Intelligence and the development of the technology sector in Albania. The government, businesses, the ICT industry and universities jointly discussed concrete steps for skills development, financing, the use of data and the application of Artificial Intelligence in the economy and the public sector.

Prime Minister Rama also attended the meeting, together with the Minister of Economy and Innovation, Delina Ibrahimaj.

The forum highlighted the importance of cooperation between the public sector, enterprise, the technology industry and academia in harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence and turning it into a driver of development for the economy and public administration.

For his part, Prime Minister Rama announced that a National Programme for Artificial Intelligence is being prepared, in which all stakeholders will have the opportunity to contribute and find their role in this process.

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Prime Minister Edi Rama: Thank you very much! I recall that last year we organised the first edition of this Innovation Forum, and today we are holding its second edition, while developments in the world of information technology are advancing at a great pace. Artificial Intelligence is, in fact, at the centre of today’s discussions, and we are preparing a national programme for it, in which everyone will have the opportunity to have their say and, at the same time, find their place.

We are also aware that all the topics under discussion, unlike in any other field, are evolving at an extraordinary pace. On the one hand, this is a great blessing for countries such as ours, because technology allows us to make great leaps forward. On the other hand, it is a constant warning signal, because we may likewise fall far behind if we fail to keep pace with this new era.

There are three elements that must be considered together, both for this forum and for our interaction.

First, the real problems, which means solutions based on a thorough understanding and the most accurate possible diagnosis of the actual situation.

Second, concrete and feasible proposals, not general aspirations; and third, a readiness for all of us to engage together, because we are increasingly “bound” to pursue this programme jointly.

Some data, which I believe are also of interest to those following us, illustrate the extraordinary pace at which the sector is developing. Today, the technology sector exports products worth EUR 222 million, three times more than only a few years ago.

Today, almost 30,000 technology professionals are active in this sector. Almost 30,000—to be precise, 28,500—a figure that has changed even during the course of this year; and seven out of ten of the sector’s protagonists, meaning seven out of these almost 30,000 professionals employed in it, are under 35 years of age.

Today, we are seeing highly significant wage growth in this sector. At the same time, the sector now has a discernible share in Albania’s Gross Domestic Product—negligible until only recently—of 2.2%. It unquestionably needs to be higher, but this is a meaningful figure in terms of the sector’s potential.

Today, we are also fortunate that the e-Albania platform has 3.4 million registered users, both citizens and businesses, and that Albania ranks in the United Nations Online Services Index at a position which, not many years ago, we could not even have imagined our country attaining.

Furthermore, I wish to emphasise that it is now essential for us to establish a public cloud infrastructure and national computing capacity that will make government data securely accessible to both enterprise and academia.

A national catalogue of open data, supported by interoperability standards, is essential so that services and platforms can be built ever more quickly and with ever greater accuracy. Meanwhile, we have begun exploring the possibility of establishing data centres, but I must say from the outset that this issue is far more complex than it may initially appear.

On the other hand, while the public sector—the Albanian Government and its institutions—today enjoys a major advantage as a result of the significant progress we have made in that sector, we lag far behind in the private sector. Only 24% of businesses trade online. This is a very low figure. Only 9% of enterprises use Artificial Intelligence and, compared with the more than 90% of citizens who have online access, this is a concerning figure.

Our objective for technology exports is to reach EUR 1 billion within this decade, by 2030. It is achievable, and for this reason we will continue to strengthen support for start-ups. I am very pleased that this year we have seen a major increase in applications, while also doubling the fund that supports start-ups. We intend to do the same next year if the sector continues to display the same trend.

We plan to launch several pilot projects involving state institutions and private companies in tourism, agriculture, healthcare and finance, in order to foster innovation and increase the use of technology in these key sectors.

We are engaged in a highly valuable working process with the Albanian-American Development Foundation to expand the network of TUMO centres beyond Tirana. The Tirana centre has been an extraordinary success, but it is also under considerable pressure. Talent, meanwhile, exists everywhere, and technology talent in particular is found in areas with fewer opportunities, because young people see technology as a chance to soar beyond the circumstances in which they feel trapped. Expanding these centres will therefore be highly beneficial, as will expanding smart laboratories in schools. We are now approaching a total of 300 smart laboratories, but our objective, and the funding available, is to equip every school with a smart laboratory. This will then have a direct impact on the number of children preparing to enter and work in this sector.

Today, we are also seeing a very positive trend of steady growth in the number of students studying technology. There are currently 9,000 and, much to my satisfaction in this regard, the proportion of girls studying technology is among the highest in Europe. This is further evidence of a view I have long held: that in Albania, girls and women are far more intelligent than men and boys.

The national programme for training in artificial intelligence technology will be open to individuals and will be made mandatory for the public administration.

We have begun a process of integrating artificial intelligence modules into the public administration at the first level, initially in legal directorates, and we will extend this across all levels so that the administration has access to exceptionally qualified assistance through artificial intelligence modules. At the same time, we will increase financing grants through the Innovation Fund for Applied Research and University–Industry Partnerships, precisely in the area where we currently face the greatest difficulty and lag furthest behind.

Another significant aspect of the remarkable progress we have made in the public sector and public institutions is Albania’s rise to the highest level of cyber protection. This was also highlighted by the National Cyber Security Index 2026, in which Albania ranks first.

There is nothing surprising about this, because this is the blessing of technology. It enables you to make leaps that would otherwise have been extraordinarily slower and far more uniform under the linear course of development that existed before technology brought about this fundamental change in our lives; in practice, the gaps would have been insurmountable. It took a ferocious attack on our digital infrastructure for us to take action, invest in cybersecurity and build the highly advanced cybersecurity system we have today. In fact, Albania is under attack every day, and you hear nothing about it because all those attacks strike our defensive wall and are unable to penetrate the parts of our public infrastructure around which we have built that wall. But this does not mean that we are not vulnerable in the private sector.

We are currently seeing continuous growth in the number of applications submitted through the e-Albania platform. Applications have increased by more than 40% in the past two years alone.

At the same time, we are working intensively to build the first 360-degree public procurement system powered by artificial intelligence, redesign e-Albania and move into its second generation, e-Albania 2.0, with new service standards and much easier access.

All these initiatives form part of a process that continues every day. Diella is now well established, and we are working to extend the module featuring Diella’s children to other areas of public administration as well.

In closing, I wish to emphasise something for the entire sector. Following the negative experience we went through with AKSHI(National Agency for Information Society), due to the approaches of certain companies that were inconsistent with legal and ethical standards—and here I do not simply mean what emerged publicly, but something else as well: the extremely low standards of private companies accustomed to milking the state budget through the maintenance services they provide.

On the other hand, that system—which naturally responded to a new era of transformation, and to a transformation that advanced very far, very quickly—in effect turned private companies into hunters of the state budget. I do not mean this in the negative sense of the expression, but rather in the sense of their dependence on the state budget. We believe that ending this dependence will also contribute to the growth of research and innovation in Albania. Closing off the path to that dependence, so to speak, will cause many companies to look inwards and towards the private sector, because an unhealthy relationship developed between those companies and the private sector. The easiest thing became: “Get some money from the state and provide a service here; get some money from the state and sign a contract there,” and so on.

For this reason, we have established our own public company. The aim is for all public services to be covered by our public company, naturally step by step. There is absolutely no difficulty in doing this. In this way, on the one hand, we will strengthen the state’s in-house capacity in terms of services and the modules required for state functions with the assistance of technology; on the other hand, we will encourage private companies to find new avenues, grow and become stronger by conducting their own private business. Naturally, this does not preclude cooperation during the process, whereby the public company may enter into partnerships with certain private companies that can offer new solutions for the public sector—but these must be new, innovative solutions, not a rush to the state budget’s tender calendar. That no longer makes any sense, and I believe this is clear to everyone.

Year after year, we will increase the budget for supporting the sector very substantially. I would therefore call on companies to explore precisely the avenues for securing this support through cooperation with businesses, cooperation with universities and innovations that will then also receive state support to develop further within this ecosystem.

This will require a substantial increase in support for start-ups, and not only for start-ups. We are fully prepared to provide that support, now that the ecosystem has begun to develop muscles of its own—still fragile, but ready to be nurtured further and to take on more responsibility.

Thank you once again, and I hope that all the round-table discussions that have been organised will prove fruitful and that, in the end, we will arrive at a series of conclusions that we can then pursue together.