Prime Minister Rama today paid a visit to the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen – NRW) in Germany, where he took part in the proceedings of the Ruhr Summit, one of Europe’s most important events dedicated to innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology.

The summit brought together startups, established companies, corporations, investors, professionals, and creators of the future at the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum, offering a unique platform for exchanging ideas, building partnerships, and actively promoting innovation.

At the opening of the Summit, under the theme “AI, Power and Progress: Rethinking Leadership for a New Era,” Prime Minister Rama addressed those present with a speech:

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Prime Minister Edi Rama: Thank you very much. It was very heartwarming that when we were all worrying that we were late, we were told to take our time. It’s a good step for Germany to not be in time and to not worry about it.

So, thank you for this opportunity and let me share with you some thoughts about what I was asked to say about AI power and progress.

It is a strange and beautiful thing to stand here and talk about the future of intelligence inside a building that was once a steel plant. A century ago, this hole transformed steel into power. Then one day the world changed, and the coal ran out, the furnaces fell silent, the smoke cleared. Many looked at this region and imagined it would become a museum dedicated to an age that had ended.

But people of this region stood inside the magnificent skeleton of the old economy and instead of asking how to preserve it, they asked the only question that has ever moved civilization forward: What could this become? And the answer surrounds us today.

So, I think that there is no better place to ask another question: If this building once embodied industrial power, what does power look like now? And perhaps even more importantly, who gets to possess it?

And let me begin with a confession. For almost all human history, power was something you could weigh. It was coal beneath the ground, steel inside factories, oil beneath deserts, ships crossing oceans, armies guarding borders, factories, banks, territory, population. Power was heavy. Because it was heavy, it was scarce. Because it was scarce, it accumulated. And because it accumulated history, it became the story of those fortunate or ruthless enough to control it.

Small countries learned to live with gravity, large countries created it. But intelligence behaved differently. Intelligence is light. It does not lie hidden beneath mountains waiting to be extracted.

It does not belong naturally to those born above particular minerals or rivers. For the first time in our history, our species, the most valuable raw material of power, the ability to know, to compare, to reason, to discover, and increasingly to decide, is becoming abundant. And that changes everything.

Because of the abundance of redistributed power. The industrial age rewards scale, the intelligence age rewards imagination. This is perhaps the quiet revolution unfolding beneath all the headlines. When power was called a small country, it remained a small country. When power is intelligence, a small country can become a laboratory. And I guess this is why I’m invited here. as representative of one of the smallest laboratories in Europe.

And let me tell you a story about Albania, not because it is unique, but because it reminds us how quickly history can reverse itself. For almost half a century we lived inside perhaps the most isolated dictatorship of this continent, kind of North Korea of Europe. We built bunkers instead of bridges, walls instead of windows, suspicion instead of trust. The state knew everything about the citizens; the citizens knew almost nothing about the state. And when freedom finally arrived, we inherited democracy, but we also inherited its opposite. A bureaucracy built for rather control than service. papers, stamps, signatures, queues, endless corridors.

Every administrative procedure became a pilgrimage. Every office had another office. Every signature required another signature. And behind every counter stood someone who possessed something more valuable than the document itself: discretion. Every stamp was a small gate. Every signature, another lock, every queue, another reminder that power still belonged to someone else. And behind too many of those doors stood an open hand. That was the architecture of power we inherited.

The challenge before us was never simply to digitize forms, it was to redesign power itself. And here we come to corruption, Corruption is not merely a moral failure, it is an architectural failure. It flourishes wherever unnecessary discretion survives. It grows wherever opacity becomes normal. It leaves wherever citizens must ask another human being for something that already belongs to them by right.

So, we made a choice, not to modernize government, but to reinvent the relationship between the citizen and the state, by digital brick, service after service. And today, Albania has more than 1,000 public services fully digital. And for all these services, which count to close to 95% of all services, citizens do not need to go anywhere and to meet anyone. They just need to click on their phones. And the remaining services are like, for example, getting married. There is still not an online way to do it. Fingerprints and certain other services.

So, government comes to the citizens and not the other way around. But the greatest achievement of this first step was never convenience. Convenience is pleasant. Freedom is transformative. Because something remarkable happens when governments become digital. You do not simply remove paperwork. You remove opportunities for invisible power. You remove the unnecessary meeting. You remove the unnecessary favor. You remove the unnecessary gatekeeper. As it turns out, it is extraordinarily difficult to bribe a server.

Digitalization is often described as a technological reform, it is not. This would be too modest. It is a democratic reform. It changes not only how the state functions, but it also changes who possesses power inside the state. And once we had begun the journey, another question followed: If technology could help citizens navigate government, why couldn’t intelligence itself become part of the government. That question eventually became a person, or rather something resembling one. We built artificial intelligence to guide citizens through public services. Then we decided that many considered either visionary or completely absurd. On certain morning, I confess, I belong to both camps. We gave this intelligence a face, a voice, a name. We called her Diella. In Albanian, Diella means the sun. And then we did something no-government had done so far: we appointed her to a cabinet-level role. The headlines wrote themselves. Some call it the future; others call it a circus. I have learned in this profession that when both your admirers and your critics are shouting at the same volume, you have usually touched something very real. But let me strip away the avatar and the headlines because the real story is far more interesting than the symbol. We did not bring artificial intelligence into government to replace public servants. We brought it to redesign one of the places where democratic government is at its most vulnerable, the exercise of administrative discretion.

Take public procurements, every government must buy roads, medicine, schools, technology. Public procurement is where states transform public money into public value. But it’s also where opacity, complexity, discretion have too often allowed public trust to leak away. So, we asked ourselves a different question. What if artificial intelligence could become an intelligent partner throughout the entire public procurement process? Not to replace people, but to strengthen institutions. And today we are building exactly that.

And my dream is that we finalize it and then we sell it to Germany. Yeah, after 35 years being hammered from Germany that we must fight corruption, it would be fantastic if we contribute for Germans to fight also some of their corruption. An AI procurement system that assists every stage of public purchasing. So, I’m not going to go into many details because they told me I must speak shortly, although it’s never a good idea to invite a man from the Balkans and then to ask a short speech.

 

There is something I must stress: Democracy cannot be delegated to an algorithm. Judgment remains human, accountability remains human, responsibility remains human. What artificial intelligence does is something simpler but much more profound. It gives honest public servants better information before they exercise judgment. And it makes dishonest decisions dramatically harder to hide. An algorithm is not wise. It has no conscience. It has no moral instinct. But an algorithm has no cousin. It cannot be invited to dinner. It cannot receive a discreet phone call. It cannot decide that today it will simply look the other way.

The point was never to make the machine powerful, the point was exactly the opposite: to reduce a particular kind of human power, the power to decide in the dark. We did not choose the name Diella by accident. The sun does not negotiate with the shadows; it simply removes them.

Behind Diella, we are building something far less theatrical, far less photogenic and infinitely more important. We call it gov AI. If DIELLA is the face of our transformation, gov AI is the nervous system. It is the layer of intelligence that quietly runs beneath the visible institutions of the state, not replacing ministries but connecting them, not replacing public servants but amplifying their capacity.

Think of it as an institutional intelligence, a government that can read faster than any individual compares more documents than any department, remember every precedent, connect information that today is isolated inside separate bureaucracies, and learn, learn continuously, improve continuously.

Artificial intelligence has often been described as the next industrial revolution. I think this description is incomplete. For governments, it is the next administrative revolution. For centuries, states have expanded by adding people, increasingly. Every new responsibility meant another office, another department, another archive, another level of administration, and you in Germany are the best in doing this. With artificial intelligence, capacity no longer grows only by becoming larger, it grows by becoming smarter. Imagine a ministry that can instantly analyze thousands of pages of legislation. Imagine inspectors who identify risks before they become even standards. Imagine social policies that detect vulnerable families before they fall through the cracks. Imagine healthcare systems that allocate resources before hospitals become overwhelmed. Imagine administration that spends less time searching for information and much more time solving problems. This is not science fiction. It is becoming administrative reality. And perhaps nowhere is this transformation more consequential than in the defining project of our country’s future joining the European Union. For them who see it from distance, accession is political negotiation. But yes, it is. In the meantime, anyone who has went through this process has realized that this is also the most demanding neurotic administrative exercise ever created by human beings, 33 chapters and 3 criteria, more than 100,000 pages of European legislation and regulation, thousands of directives, thousands of additional regulations, thousands of judicial decisions, countless implementation reports, constant comparison, constant monitoring, constant adaptation, and all this needs to be transferred from the European body of law to our country’s body of law. And so, for decades, this work has happened upon extraordinary efforts. by adding to the typical public service two big armies: one army of lawyers, one army of translators, and by spending incredible money on European taxpayers. Necessary work, essential work, but also very time-consuming and money-consuming work.

So, we asked ourselves another question. The second OpenAI came to light because we had the chance to see that one of the creators was an Albanian fellow. And I called her right away and I said, “It sounds like you can help Albania to get closer and faster to the European Union.” She laughed. She thought I was kidding. But then when I explained, she said, “Doable.” So together with OpenAI, we created a model that makes us completely different from every other country in turning artificial intelligence into a tool to make this transfer of documentation fast time and in top quality and to implement it within our body of law.

So, this is how artificial intelligence will never negotiate with Brussels, nor should it, but although political judgment belongs to elected governments, democratic legitimacy belongs to citizens, trust between nations can never be generated by an algorithm, artificial intelligence can remove friction, can compress administrative time, can multiply institutional capacities. And for a country like Albania, this is not technological innovation. It is a strategic accelerator. The standards remain the same, but the speed and the quality change. And perhaps for the first time in European history, the success of a candidate country will depend less upon the size of its bureaucracy than upon the intelligence of its institutions.

So, my time is running out. They put me a chronometer. So, I had many more interesting things to say. But unfortunately, you must blame your organizers and your hosts. I’m just a guest. And I must be good to the host and not abuse of the time.

But I want to end with something that brings all this from the good to the bad and to the ugly. And the ugly is not the machine. The ugly is what happens when extraordinary intelligence meets an economic model that profits from outrage.

We speak endlessly about artificial intelligence and rightly so. We speak far too little about artificial attention. And yet attention has become the scarcest resource in democracy. For generations we believed that power comes from information. Today information is abundant, attention is power, and whoever shapes attention increasingly shapes perception. Whoever shapes perception increasingly shapes politics.

The Internet promised to democratize information. Social media promised to democratize voice. What few anticipated was the emergence of a new political actor, the algorithm. Unlike governments, the algorithm has no democratic accountability. Unlike judges, algorithms have no duty of impartiality. Unlike journalists, algorithms have no professional ethics. Unlike scientists, algorithms have no commitment to evidence. It has only one objective: optimization. Not for truth, not for democracy, not for wisdom, but for engagement. And outrage almost always performs better than nuance. Someone that breaks a piano always attracts more attention than a beautiful Mozart piece played by a great pianist.

In the first case, the room would be full. In the second case, the room would be close to empty. Fear speeds faster than evidence, certainly travels farther than truth, by no doubt out speeds by far every doubt. Conspiracy outruns correction, not because people have become suddenly irrational, but because rational human beings increasingly make decisions inside systems engineered to maximize emotional reaction.

The algorithm does not hate democracy; it simply does not know what democracy is. A few weeks ago, maybe you have seen, my own country became a small laboratory of this large phenomenon. Many of you may have heard about what became known internationally as the Flamingo Revolution.

As Prime Minister, I consider this protest an important message to me and to my government. I’m listening and trying to understand that message very, very carefully, not by counting the people in the streets, and not by measuring hashtags, but by trying to understand the concerns, the anxieties, the hopes that brought people there. Governments that stop listening eventually stop governing. Whatever conclusions we ultimately reach on the issues themselves, it is a difficulty acknowledging that this protest has already achieved something valuable. It has become living evidence of the democratic transformation of Albania.

I grew up in a country where demonstrations were organized by the state. Attendance was compulsory, agreement was compulsory, and applause was compulsory. And then we went through a transition when protests were dangerous. And in the same boulevard where flamingos are celebrating freedom, we had people that were killed, protesters that lost their life not long ago. But what I want to say is that, after all these goods came the bed the business model the protest entered the machinery of algorithmic amplification and became the arena of malign actors’ reality acquired a digital twin. Every rumor became a recommendation. Every exaggeration became engagement. Every emotional reaction became another signal for the platform to produce even more of the same. And every nuance disappeared. Context disappeared. Complexity disappeared.

Soon the online protest was no longer describing the protest. It was manufacturing another one, larger, angrier, simpler, more certain. Eventually, millions of people who have not set foot in Albania experienced not the demonstration itself, but the algorithm’s interpretation of it. And digital reality became more influential than the physical one. And that is the ugly. Not the citizens, not the protest, the distortion. The replacement of reality by optimization. And this is not only an Albanian story.

Final remark, democracies are self-harming themselves I’m afraid towards the point of non-return, because democracies, the big ones, from here to other big countries where there is no doubt that there is democracy in action, have not yet found the courage to make the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach.

Treating freedom of reach as the extension of freedom of speech means giving up on truth, giving up on nuances, giving up on doubts and doing or letting something happen dictatorships always did. Every dictatorship is based on the reach, reaching every mind, seeding in every brain its own official truth and suppressing every other alternative and every other opinion.

Algorithms do not need to be suppressed by secret police or by beating people in the streets or by having political prisoners. Algorithms simply suffocate everything else than outrage. And this is then what you see in Germany and what we see everywhere in Europe how politics becomes more and more and more a battle between extremes and how the center becomes more and more and more an empty space where every extreme that gets the vote to run the country trying to come more to the center produces another extreme which is even worse than that extreme was considered to be.

What is the end of this? I don’t know. And the great thing of being Prime Minister of Albania is that you are not supposed to fix the problems of the world, and you are not supposed to give the answer to the questions Germany, France and the others should answer better soon than later.

Thank you so much.