Leading in the Digital Era: How can the Public Sector prepare for the AI age?

WSIS 2024 Panel Explores Digital Leadership and AI Readiness in the Public Sector

**Extended Summary:**

At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 2024, a leadership panel moderated by Dr. Tawfik Jelassi from UNESCO convened to discuss the challenges and strategies for leading in the digital era, particularly how the public sector can prepare for the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and embrace digital transformation. The panel featured government officials and experts from Barbados, Cambodia, India, and Slovenia.

**Key Points and Discussions:**

1. **Rapid Advancement of Digital Technologies:** – Dr. Jelassi highlighted the exponential growth of digital technologies, noting that the AI market in government and public services is projected to grow significantly by 2030. – The panel emphasized the need for the public sector to harness the potential of digital advancements through capacity building and transformation.

2. **Challenges to Digital Transformation:** – A Deloitte survey indicated that 85% of government employees view organizational culture as a major obstacle to digital transformation, with the public sector’s aversion to innovation and failure contrasting with the private sector’s approach. – A World Bank report showed that nearly half of the countries lack programs to improve digital skills in the public sector, highlighting a global skills gap.

3. **National Strategies and Capacity Building:** – The panelists discussed the importance of creating ecosystems that support digital transformation, including infrastructure and trust among stakeholders. – National strategies for capacity building were shared, with examples from Slovenia and Cambodia on their approaches to digital skills development and the creation of digital public infrastructure.

4. **Ethics and AI Strategy:** – UNESCO’s role in setting global standards for the ethics of AI was mentioned, with the 2021 UNESCO recommendation on AI ethics serving as a key reference. – The necessity for countries to develop national AI strategies was stressed, with only a third of countries reported to have such a strategy according to the AI Index Report 2024.

**Evidence and Observations:**

– The panelists provided concrete examples of their countries’ initiatives, such as Barbados’ National Transformation Initiative offering digital courses to citizens and the development of a digital ID system. – Cambodia’s Secretary of State, Dr. Makara Kov, discussed the country’s digital economy and society policy framework, emphasizing the need for trust, infrastructure, and human capital development. – India’s Joint Secretary, Mr. Sushil Pal, detailed the country’s AI mission and its focus on hyperscale compute, quality data sets, and responsible AI, highlighting India’s leadership in AI skill penetration and contributions to AI projects on GitHub.

**Conclusion:**

The session concluded with a call to action for countries to embrace digital transformation as a means to improve public services and the relationship between governments and citizens. Dr. Jelassi announced a global conference on digital transformation in the public sector to be held in Paris in February 2025 and introduced a UNESCO pledge for capacity building in digital transformation.

**Noteworthy Insights:**

– The discussion revealed a consensus that digital transformation is not solely about technology but about people, leadership, and changing mindsets. – There was a recognition of the widening gap between the rate of technological advances and the rate of adoption, with a need for cautious progression to ensure inclusivity. – The audience’s contributions highlighted the importance of awareness, leadership, and capacity building in achieving effective digital transformation. – Collaboration between industry, international organizations, and governments was emphasized as crucial for aligning efforts with educational standards and ensuring the relevance of digital transformation initiatives.

In summary, the WSIS 2024 session underscored the multifaceted nature of digital transformation in the public sector, the challenges it presents, and the collaborative efforts required to overcome these challenges and leverage the opportunities presented by AI and other digital technologies.

Prateek Sibal:
and great to have you all here. Recording in progress. We’ll just be starting the session now. I’m Pratik Sibal from UNESCO. I’m a program specialist working on AI and digital transformation. I see many familiar faces in the room, and thanks to the minister from Iraq for joining us also, and also from Senegal. Thank you so much. Today, we have an exciting panel. We have Dr. Taufik Djilasi, the assistant director general of UNESCO, who will be moderating this leadership panel. We have Dr. Emilia Stoimena-Vardou from Slovenia, a great friend of UNESCO. We have Ms. Marcia Caddy, the minister of industry, innovation, science, and technology from Barbados. Thank you for joining us. We have Dr. Makara Kov, secretary of state for ministry of post and telecommunications from Cambodia, also a great partner and some exciting work coming up with UNESCO and Cambodia. And we have Mr. Sushil Pal, joint secretary from ministry of electronics and information technology, India, with us. Without further ado, I would like to pass on the floor to Dr. Djilasi to take us through this exciting panel. Over to you, Dr. Djilasi.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you, Pratik. Good morning, all excellencies, esteemed guests, vicious participants. I’m very pleased to moderate this session on leading in the digital era. How can the public sector prepare for the AI age? Let me start by a few remarks before I give the floor to each one of our panelists and hopefully to have time for some Q&A, time permitting. Clearly, since we are in WSIS 2024, 20 years have passed. Actually, 21 years have passed since the Geneva 2003, first edition of WSIS. Needless to say, we are all aware of the extremely rapid growth of the digital era. rapid advancement of digital technologies. In the previous session, we just touched on the impact of generative AI on education, teaching, and learning. But of course, digital technologies advancement permeate all walks of life and every field and every domain. Just since I mentioned AI, the global AI in government and public services market is projected to expand from $20 billion last year to $51 billion in 2030. This is based on a recent study that was published. Clearly, we are at the dawn of a new era, and it’s imperative for public sector and governments to set up the right priorities, especially in terms of capacity building, capacity development of civil servants and others, if we want to fully harness the power and the potential of these digital advancements. However, in trying to do that, and I used to be minister of ICT myself and minister of education and research, so I did face some of the barriers and challenges, and I’m sure that my colleagues here, who are also ministers and top government officials, would share with us their own perspectives about challenges faced, and more importantly, maybe the solutions they have found to overcome barriers to digital transformation. Among these barriers, let me again mention here a recent Deloitte survey that said 85% of government employees cited organizational culture as a major challenge in succeeding the digital transformation. Organizational culture, why is that? And the same report says, because government and public sector does not naturally lend itself to innovation, to experimentation. innovation to learning by doing. And of course, these are more qualities, quote-unquote, of the private sector, not to shy away from disruptive innovation, to test and learn, and even learn from failures. Governments typically are averse to failures, and they are not known necessarily for disruptive innovations. Of course, some examples today will give us the counter-argument to that. Second statistic I would like to share with you, which is quite alarming. According to the World Bank, 46% of countries in the world lack programs to improve digital skills in the public sector. 46% of countries in the world lack programs to improve digital skills in the public sector. If you don’t have the right skill set, the right competencies, how can you then succeed in digital transformation? How can you then capitalize on the powerful abilities of digital technologies? So obviously, these are major barriers or challenges, I should say, they are not insurmountable. But of course, government has to take a strong stance, obviously, to address the issue of organizational culture, to embrace innovation, to accept the prospect of failure when you innovate, but also to equip civil servants with the right skill set and competency, and of course, adopt maybe a more agile, flexible way of working. Again, these things, we have seen them in the private sector, but they are also highly meaningful and relevant to the public sector. One last statistic. According to the AI Index Report 2024, only 75 countries have a national AI strategy. So we have one third of the… countries worldwide which do not have a strategy for artificial intelligence. And when we say strategy, does it mean for immediate implementation and execution? But at least there is foresight. The governments have done their homework. This means also that 60% of countries in the world are ill-equipped to successfully navigate the digital disruption. Let me put it maybe in a bit of a provocative way, it’s 10 a.m., 10.15, I can afford this. We all recognize that the world around us is changing. Are we changing? Are we changing enough in the face of the digital disruption? And the digital disruption is not about to end. It’s still at the beginning. And it is impacting all sectors, all domains, all, yeah, I mean, including, of course, public sector, government. I mentioned education, which we looked at at 9 o’clock. So again, this is something that is happening. We say we should leave no one behind, but we should leave no nation behind. We should leave no country behind. And this is WSIS, the World Summit on the Information Society. Are we today in an information society? Have we today made strides towards a knowledge-based society, a knowledge-based economy? So again, these are questions, of course, for policymakers, for strategists, and I’m sure that our distinguished panelists will share with us their perspectives in this. Now, let me say a few words about UNESCO before I turn it to the panelists. UNESCO has recognized the urgency of these challenges, and UNESCO has committed to supporting its 194 member states in digital transformation, in AI, in capacity building. efforts. When I say AI, many of you may know that UNESCO has, since 2021, the first standard-setting instrument in the world on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The work started back in 2017, and in 2021, all UNESCO member states have approved the UNESCO recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence. That’s more than a year before CHED-GPT. And of course, today we have moved into the implementation of this recommendation on the ethics of AI, and to date we have more than 50 countries around the world implementing the UNESCO recommendation on the ethics of AI. This is one specific effort that I wanted to mention as far as knowledge-sharing, standard-setting, and international digital cooperation. So we are here today to learn from a number of countries, represented by our panelists, about their digital transformation agenda, about their experiences to date, their initiatives, and to learn, of course, from their successes. And the panelists were introduced by my colleague Pratik Sibal. Let me just for the sake of time mention some of the questions I would like us to focus on as far as national strategies for capacity building in the public sector. So let me mention four questions and I will have maybe more specific questions to each panelist subsequently. How is the government in your country creating an ecosystem for digital transformation? No one can do it alone. You need to have the right ecosystem in place. Sometimes it’s a new ecosystem of partners. The second question, what are the challenges that government officials and ministers have been facing or are currently facing as far as digital transformation? And the best ways to address these challenges are the solutions found. And how would you go about capacity building of civil servants since, yes, and here let me quote Minister Du, who in the earlier morning session mentioned digital connectivity, digital equipment, computers, tablets, but also digital skills. So the capacity building, the capacity development of civil servants are very important nowadays. Let me start with the first, let me look at my notes because they have changed my notes this morning. I know, you’re right, but you see, at 9.40 they gave me new updates, so I have to stick to that. All right, I didn’t have the time to connect and to download. Oh, here we are, perfect, perfect, perfect. So I can start, actually, the order here, if you allow me, Dr. Emilia, I am starting with Barbados, yes, Her Excellency Masha Kadel, Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology. You know, you heard the questions, let me maybe leave it there and give you the floor.

Marsha Caddle :
Thank you. Good morning, colleagues. This is a topic that is at the front of our minds in Barbados and in the CARICOM region, so let me jump straight into the conversation. The question is exactly, perfectly put. How are we creating an ecosystem? What are the capacity considerations and what are some of the challenges for the digital transformation pathway that we’re on? Let me say first that Barbados is a small country. We say small island state, but we also say large ocean state. we have a lot of capacity, of 270,000 people. Those colleagues from small countries will probably appreciate that even with a small population, sometimes the level of bureaucracy can match a population of 20 million people. At the end of it, we have a country to run and countries run in a particular way, as at least they have historically. I’ll say that we, I think we’ve all around this table and around the world learned a lot from the innovation that we had to implement during the COVID pandemic. And in fact, Barbados, notwithstanding its small size, I dare say was able to show quite a bit of leadership in how we handled the pandemic and how we, like many other countries, had to deploy digital solutions to many things. Barbados is still heavily tourism-based. 40% of our GDP comes from tourism and related services. And so in the pandemic, we saw an 18% decline in GDP, one of the hardest hit economies in the world. But in response, we used that ecosystem of developers and practitioners in tech to build apps that were able to serve to get food and medications to people very early on, that was able to serve to help. We didn’t close for as long a period, close our borders for as long a period as many other tourism-based economies. We got economies, we got the tourism sector back up and running because we were able to deploy apps that were able to track people who might have been exposed to COVID and were able to use these applications in the management of our healthcare. That is important. We developed something called the BIMSAFE app and the SHAPE app, which I think really. could be replicated around the world. But a lot of what we learned there, we taught ourselves that we could mobilize quickly and early to respond with a technology response. And so I think that that started to permeate the culture a bit and I’ll get a little bit to the culture in a minute. I also want to say that we are doing a fantastic job doing a few things at once. And like most countries here, we have every ball in the air when it comes to technology because everything is upon us at once. And we have to make sure that we’re not catching up to the latest, but we’re catching up to the future. So we’ve implemented a digital ID. My colleague who’s leading that is here in the room with me. That, as well as a digital transformation that sees us having all government services online, of course, a digital ID as a unique identifier is the core of that system to be able to have all government services available to people in an online environment. And the most recent initiative of ours is that we are seeking to bring compute to that same developer ecosystem to be able to build out a data and technology sector as the new industrial transformation to diversify away from tourism, which is important. So what does all of that mean in terms of skills? We certainly do have a skills deficit. In order to respond to that very early on in 2018, we started something called a National Transformation Initiative. National Transformation Initiative is a system of making available to every Barbadian citizen a choice of 1500 courses through Coursera. And many of them are based on technology. And this is an on-demand system. A Barbadian can go on and learn any coding language, can do courses in data science. science and so on, and that’s one of the things we started to do early on. We also have an important partnership with the University of the West Indies. Now, just this morning, we were in a session, the Women’s Network of Technology Ministers. One of the things we talked about was how do people look around and see that there is a pathway, there is a career, that my skills are going to be relevant. And one of the things that we’ve sought to do in Barbados in partnership with the university there is to be able to build a real pipeline to the sectors that we are building up. So, for example, we are building a data center to make compute available to developers so that we have an indigenous technology sector growing up to be able to provide income earning opportunities for people. But we don’t have a skills pipeline for that. And we realized that we’re going to have to build that from the primary to secondary to tertiary level and make sure that people can look and see that if they do degrees in engineering, in mathematics, in physics, in science, that they then later have an opportunity to participate in the sector. And that’s something that we’re working very closely with the university on. It means that we have to develop new courses in data science, data analytics and so on. It also means that we have to change the way that we do business in government. Our procurement systems have to adapt to technology. I’ve seen where we started to procure a particular technology and by the time we got to the end of the procurement exercise, that technology had now been replaced by another. So we need the agile procurement systems and the orientation towards those that are going to serve us in the sector. We also need a new approach to business process reengineering. Technology that is placed on top of outdated process will not help us and will not serve us. And so we will have to make sure that we’re finding the shortest distance to a successful business. solution, first in the process, and then to bring technologies to bear. We definitely have a whole-of-country approach. We’re not just targeting the public sector, but we believe that if we have a whole-of-country approach in a country of 270,000 people, that we will do what is necessary. The last thing I’ll say before I give back the floor is that we’ve also created GovTech because we realize that the quick solutions that need to be developed, governments are not the very best at developing them, and so we need to create companies that are able to move more quickly than a traditional public service would. I’ll start with those thoughts. Thank you so much.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you very much, Minister, and welcome to the latecomers to this session. I see we have now a full room, which shows the interest you have in this topic. Let me give the floor now to my colleague and friend, Dr. Emilia Du, Minister of Digital Transformation in Slovenia. Please.

Emilija Stojmenova Duh:
Thank you so much, and first of all, dear colleague, I would like to congratulate you on the excellent work you are doing in UNESCO. I was really – yesterday I received this brochure about artificial intelligence and digital transformation competences for civil servants. It will be definitely very useful for our country. So what we are doing in terms of digital transformation, I agree a lot what has been said by my colleague. We are on a second panel this morning already, and in Slovenia, we have a lack of experts, absolutely. So, but if we want to make sure that we have digital transformation, it’s not only enough to have ICT experts. We need people that have digital skills and competences. And when we are speaking about civil servants, I was really surprised with the fact that I don’t know whether this result is what kind of competencies like ICT experts or even basic digital skills. Why is this so important? When we are preparing different policies, if the public servants don’t understand what digital transformation is, if they don’t know what the value of digital transformation is, how it impacts us, our societies, then we cannot expect from them to prepare policies that can make sure that we have successful digital transformation. That is why it is really important that our public servants really understand what digital transformation is. Another thing, if our colleagues at the Ministry of Finance don’t understand the importance of digital transformation, then trust me, we will not receive the budgets that we need for the digital transformation. So it is not enough that we have a Ministry of Digital Transformation, which is great. It is the first time that Slovenia has a dedicated Ministry of Digital Transformation. But it’s not enough that only people working at our ministry understand and fight for digital transformation. We need everybody on board. We need people that are working at the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Economy, and especially the Ministry of Finance as well. And it’s not enough that people at the governmental administration understand. We need the people at the local administrations also. So what we are doing in Slovenia, first is, of course, as I mentioned earlier, the connectivity, the skills and inclusion. In Slovenia, we already have an administration academy, which is dedicated for public servants. So we are funding a lot of trainings for our public servants. But we cannot force them to go and learn new skills and competencies. So it is very important to motivate them. What we usually do is we try first at our ministry also to explain how new digital technologies can support them in their work. In the past, there was a lot of fear that new digital technologies will replace them. We’re trying to tell them now, no, digital technologies will not replace you, but they will support your work. It will be easier for you to do what has to be done. And also to make sure that somehow we bridge the gap with the lack of experts that are there. So these are the things, providing skills and competencies, then also making sure that the public services we are developing are useful. We have a lot of, we are implementing, we are introducing many different services for public administrators as well. So these things should be user-friendly, should be personalized, follow the needs of our users. Then, Dr. Jelasi was mentioning that many of the countries don’t have strategies on artificial intelligence and new technologies. This is not the case with Slovenia. In Slovenia, we have adopted a national program on artificial intelligence back in 2019. We’re updating the program now. And why am I saying this? Because we have six priorities, and one of the priorities is public administration. So even back then, we knew that artificial intelligence will impact all segments of our lives. And because of that, first, we need to have a public sector that is well aware how these new technologies will change everything around us. So maybe this could be for a start, and I would be happy to share more during the discussion later.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you, Minister Du. You started mentioning the difficulty, maybe, of understanding the meaning of digital transformation. And I want to take a minute here to, we don’t have the time to ask you, what is your definition? What is your understanding of digital transformation in the public sector? I’m saying this because when I talk to government officials or public sector managers, they quite often confuse and use in an interchangeable and wrong way three terms. Digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. What is what? Are these synonyms? Of course they are not. These are different concepts. Therefore, what is the definition of each concept? Otherwise, we’ll be mixing apples and oranges. We think we are doing digital transformation, but at the end, maybe we are only doing digitization, which is the lowest level. You digitize a document, you digitize a task, you digitize an operation. You are transforming nothing. You are transforming from a paper-based or analog into a digital format, but the content remains the same when you digitize a document. Digitalization, that’s at the process level. Administrative processes, for example, how to get a new passport. You digitalize the process, but that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about transforming how the public sector works, what services to offer to citizens. We are rethinking fundamentally the relationship between government and citizens. Of course, in some countries, government services are just an app on a mobile phone. That is digital transformation. I don’t need to go to a physical administration. I don’t need to talk to a teller. I don’t need to carry a set of paper documents. It’s an app on mobile. That’s really transforming the work and the services that the government offers to citizens. Again, let me stop here, but we have to, first of all, understand clearly the meaning of digital transformation. Otherwise, we may be only doing digitization or only doing digitalization. Let me move on to our third panelist, Dr. Makara Kov. Secretary of State, Minister of Post and Telecommunications in Cambodia. Please.

Makara Khov:
Thank you. Thank you, Professor. So, let me try to contribute to our previous panelists. Well, in Cambodia, in response to what Professor have mentioned about the government homework, Cambodian government have already did the homework. So, let me recall that we used to adopt telecom law in 2015, and then telecom and ICT development policy 2016, 2020, 2016 to 2020, and then the government start to adopt Cambodia policy framework on digital economy and society 2021-2035, following the digital government policy 2022-2035. So, all the vision and priority action around more than 200 plus priority action has been mentioned in our digital economy and society policy framework, in Cambodia digital government policy. But when we take a look at all those 200 plus priority action to be implemented within 12 years time, we see that, oh, we have a lot of things to do, and we need to pick the priority among the priority on top of that. But let me go back to the building of the ecosystem. Actually, building of a digital ecosystem is not starting from scratch. We might recall the digital ecosystem today is evolving of telecom and ICT ecosystems in past 20 years or that. So, if we talk about the ecosystem, in Cambodia concept, we focus on three pillars. The first one is building trust. Trust for every stakeholder, trust for them to give them a favourable environment to contribute building up the ecosystem. This is very important. And the second pillar is building infrastructure. The government needs to take an active role to facilitate and to invest in terms of building infrastructure in particular to expand the access or to narrow down the access gap to internet connectivity for every citizen. And the third pillar is related to human capital development. It’s very important. We cannot move or we cannot develop any economy without human capital. So to do so, for the building trust, the government continues to release new policy and law and regulation that are required for the development of the economy and society, in particular with respect to the present context and the future demand as well. In Cambodia, we are preparing the three types of law right now on top of existing law is cybersecurity law, cybercrime law, and personal data protection laws. The three law is very important that would contribute to have to provide better environment for all stakeholders in order to put in place necessary digital tools such as AI and data science. And the government needs to ensure, continue to ensure that all relevant stakeholders, in particular the government institution, industry, academy, and development partner and civil society, keep momentum to continue. to contribute, to continue to work together to develop the ecosystem. It’s very important. As we can observe today that some key stakeholders in particular, the private sector, they are on the way of moving to a diverse, to have a diversion of interest comparing to other three stakeholders. Because the private sector today they are facing the tougher competition due to the fast evolving of artificial intelligence and data science. So they need to find a way to stay competitive, to survive in a more competitive environment, and as well as in the uncertainty of the struggling of world economy as well. And at the same time, we need to move another class of our citizen from the low class to the middle class to keep them with the necessary skill set as our moderator already mentioned, but equip them with necessary skill set while the gap of the digital skill demand and supply has been evolving according to introduction of AI technology as well. So we need to find a new way how to equip them the right skill set and with the adaptation capacity that allow them to switch, to change job, to learn more and from time to time. So in this regard, moving to side of human capital development, the government already released the digital skill development roadmap 2024, 2035. The government have already set the clear vision on what and where we want to go by 2035 in term of human resource development. And to do next, as the next step. that we will develop the digital skill competency frameworks that serve as the command framework for three stakeholder. One is student, they can take a look on that and then they can have better decision on what major that they should choose. And for the higher education institution, they also can take a look at that in order to prepare better curriculum to adapt the demand of the skill. And for the third stakeholder is the industry. So they can also well prepare in term of defining the skill requirement for the company, but also to address the issue of the human resource retention as well in the company. Because the majority of the private sector, they are SME, the SME they suffer a lot in term of human resource retention or that. So we suppose that we’re gonna have a comprehensive command roadmap that allow the three party to take a look at this command framework and to have the command understanding and to find the solution to address the problem together. And on top of that, moving from telecom and ICT ecosystem where we are focusing on building the broadband connectivity, building the ICT system and as well as the capacity of usage of those ICT system. Right now, the government is moving to build a digital public infrastructure that shall include three layer. One is a data sharing infrastructure. Secondly is a payment infrastructure. And lastly is the digital ID infrastructure. So, we suppose that the new digital infrastructure will support an additional digital platform that can enable all the innovation and the development of digital public services for our citizens in an agile way and also to be able to respond to the new increasing demand of our citizens as well. Last but not least, all those ideas can be implemented, but of course we need investment. Investment is very important and we need to, among the investment, we need to define the mechanism how we can do the efficient investment on different priority actions. And we just stick on the first thing that we need to focus on the first pillar is the building trust and define the mechanism that allow all the stakeholders can work together. In Cambodia, we create two funds. One is a universal service application fund that all telecom operators, they contribute 2% of their gross revenue yearly to this fund. With this fund, allow Cambodian government to rolling out more infrastructure to the server area and as well as to address the usage gap as well. And secondly, we also setting up the capacity building and research and development fund that can get 1% of gross revenue from all telecom operator to contribute to this fund. The fund is aimed to support all the program related to entrepreneurship, capacity building and research and development in order to support the innovation ecosystem in digital ecosystem of Cambodia. And last but not least, Cambodia cannot move alone. We need to work with all stakeholders, in particular our international partner and our friend as well, in order to move together and to learn about the best practices and avoid the mistakes that have been taken. taken by our friend. So thank you.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you very much, Dr. Kov. You used many times the word trust. It reminded me of a statement made by the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa, who said, without facts, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no trust. And without trust, there is no shared reality. How can citizens trust government? How can the digitally enabled government services be trustworthy? So these are very important issues about gaining online trust in the new way, in the new digital way of operating. Last but not least, let me give the floor to Mr. Sushil Pal, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in India. India, which we know has been leading the world through the digital stack, one of the first countries, not one of, the first country in the world to have given 1.2 billion citizens a unique EID number. So I’m sure that you will touch on this more. Please, the floor is yours.

Shri Sushil Pal:
Thank you, Professor Jalasi, and thank you, UNESCO, for inviting me here. I must commend UNESCO on the relevancy of the topic. As we all know that the government is always catching up with the private sector when it comes to IT, and more so when it comes to emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and quantum. We are lucky to have a very vibrant pool of talent systems, thanks to our very vibrant educational systems. And you may be knowing that as per the Stanford AI Index report, India was ranked as number one in the AI skill penetration, and also number one country in its contribution to the GitHub for the AI projects. And we firmly believe that, you know… we cannot design any policy which only focuses on the public servants. I think given the way the skill in the AI and the emerging tech in the private sector, the way it thrives there, we hope that it would rub upon the public servants only when we design the training policies which takes into account or which is done in coordination with the private sector participation. India has always believed that the technology is for the inclusion and development and with this, we launched our national strategy for AI which intent on maximizing the social economic benefit while minimizing the potential risk at the same time by ensuring that we have the ethics and the transparency ecosystem in place. We have taken various steps to make sure that the public servants in India are ready to take on the AI and other emerging technologies. Recently, we launched India AI mission which is a very important framework as to how do we handle AI. Again, it targets both the public sector as well as the private sector both. It’s got essentially seven pillars into it. We aim to focus on providing the hyperscale compute, but we do not intend creating data centers like our Honorable Minister from Barbados was mentioning. We intend doing it in a public-private partnership mode because as she mentioned, that the technology evolved so soon, but at the time we are ready for it, it becomes obsolete. So R is the totally creation of hyperscale compute, providing not only to the government sector, to the ministries and departments, but also to the startups and entrepreneurs who needs them. It’s purely on a PPP mode and intend to factor in. the prices of the emerging technologies which we definitely cannot anticipate at this time. Another important pillar is making available the quality data sets for India data set platforms. I’ll touch upon this later as I go ahead. But the idea is to develop the indigenous quality data sets on which we train our AI models so that our AI models are more relevant to our cultural and socioeconomic needs rather than which are trained on some other data sets. The other is again on building the foundational model on the indigenous data sets foundational model, including the multi-modal models as well as the large-language models. Another pillar is the R&D. Then we also take care of ensuring the safe and responsible AI and focusing on the scaling issues. Out of these seven pillars which we just mentioned, a few of them cuts across public sector in a major way. One is the focus of creating the institutional capacity. We all know that the government sits on a huge pile of data, but all this data is not ready for training the AI model. What do we do with this? Most of the time, there are a lot of issues with the data regarding its completeness, regarding its accuracy, regarding its reliability. What we have done is that we are training the lower level of staff, and we’re calling them AI curators. We have launched a national data governance framework. We are providing at least two to three data scientists in each of the ministries and each of the departments. We’re calling them AI curators so that they are able to generate the quality data sets from each ministry and departments. Then the next step, we have created a unified AI data set platform. All these quality data sets will go to a unified data so we don’t have a single separate platform for each ministries because training AI model that involves a lot of. risks in terms of we have to make sure that the anonymization tools or the policy preservation tools that are in place. So we have created a single unified dataset portal, we call it India Dataset Platform, and that dataset platforms wherein we focus on the very high-level capacity building, which as I mentioned on the policy preservation tools, on the metadata standards, as well as defining the principles for ethical and responsible AI and augmentation of a high-level skills. So I think all the datasets, so each ministry do not bother about taking care of these issues. These are taken care centrally by a central AI dataset platform. So apart from that, for skill and capacity building, as was being mentioned by various speakers, we have treated the skill at a different levels. For civil servants, we have launched Mission Karam Yogi, and which actually trains you on a lot of issues, not only on digital skill only, because civil servants, you have to perform the role. I mean, you’re not expected to be the coders, but yes, you ought to appreciate the implications of technology. You ought to know as to how the project is managed, and how especially the PPP projects, our public-private partnership projects are managed. So it focuses on a lot of other issues, but the idea is to create a future-ready civil servants, and it’s provided purely on the online mode. For the mid and lower-level staff, we have launched another training program, which provides the basic level training to the government servants, not only in the federal government, but also in the provincial government. We have a very thriving private sector skill training as well, which is called Future Skill Prime, which is totally run by the private sector, especially by industry body or NASSCOM. I mean, anybody, government servant or the private people can participate and get their certification done, and it provides training on the 10 emerging technologies. And similarly, I think coming across to the transformation aspect of Professor Gelasi, which I mean, to me, I mean, the true digital transformation is that when the person is standing in the last mile, it can avail government services without meeting a government servant. That’s the digital transformation. If you don’t have to meet government servants throughout your life cycle and still avail all the services, then that’s when you’ve achieved digital transformation. And to do this, using AI, we have launched our Bhashani project, wherein the people who are not familiar in English or Hindi, we are a diverse country. We’ve got 22 scheduled languages. So we’ve got an AI-driven Bhashani project, which does the machine-to-machine translation from any project. And it enables citizens to access services in their own languages. And again, one more important point I would like to touch upon, although we are using AI in many of our projects, including ID, including the payment, et cetera, or even the digital locker, however, to make sure that the individual ministries or departments, many times, they may not be actually aware about what problem statement they may have. So we have, again, launched a program called India AI Application Development Initiative, which is a totally sector-agnostic, not focused to a particular ministry, but it is to source problem statements from the government departments and collaborate with the private sector to find the solutions for those problem statements. On that note, Avdhan, thank you so much.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you very much for your testimony. We have time for a couple of questions from the floor. We have French interpretation. So if anyone wants to pose a question in French, feel free to do that. Was everything crystal clear for everybody? No questions at all? No comments, please, ma’am, please.

Audience:
Okay, this is Xiao. Thank you for the great session. Really a lot to learn. And here just to have a couple of comments. Actually, I’m standing on myself. I’m with a technical community and a Mac member. And I just want to say, what is digital transformation? And as I understand technology deciding our future? Definitely not. It’s people, it’s us. So I see a gap because from technical side, digitalization is something that moving fast, too fast. The technology is too fast. And from the society side, our awareness, our responding, I think is rather a little bit left behind. So what decides the future actually is a mutual function, technology and the society side, that we should make a balance. So actually, I think something that we should do from society side, I think the government takes the responsibility of these three things. The first is awareness, especially for the leaders. The awareness is so important that we cannot just need one solution or one software to deal with our problems. It’s something actually digitalization stands for future. It’s more fundamental for us. So actually, we need to learn to know that it’s so important, awareness. A second thing, I think it is leadership. We need to maybe restructure our organization. It’s not something just with some traditional functions and the way we work, we coordinate, we work with each other, restructure and maybe stand for the future. I think leadership is also very needed. And third thing, I think capacity, especially to make it more flexible to new technology, new things and try to help people use the technology and protect ourselves, but I think we need long efforts for capacity building, and thank you for the great work of UNESCO. Thank you.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you very much. I think you said it very eloquently. Digital transformation is not about digital, it’s not about technology, it’s about the people. And you stressed the leadership, the need for a vision, for a strategy, and people include the citizens, the recipients of these digital services. Of course processes and technology are enablers to achieve that transformation, but of course digital transformation is not an end in itself, it’s a means towards an end. CRM is known in public sector as customer relationship management. Can we make CRM in government like citizens relationship management? Can government have better relationship with its citizens? Can it offer better services, seamlessly, hassle-free, without having to queue, without having to be tossed around from one administration to the other, without taking time from your work to go to an administration which is open Monday to Friday, nine to five, when you are supposed to be at work? So I agree with you. It’s people first, but people start with the leaders, the visionaries who set things in motion. So I fully agree with your statement, thank you for that. Any additional remark or question from anybody? Here I know that you have some ministers as well and government officials in the room. I see a couple of hands. Chronological order, madam first.

Audience:
Thanks, my name is Professor Salma, thank you so much, Professor Salma Abbasi. Excellent presentations from the government side of things, different approaches and holistic. What I want to say, my colleague, I don’t know her, but we’re on the same frequency. What I was going to say is technology, the speed at which new technology is coming, is exponential this way and it’s being pushed by private sector, but our capacity and capability as citizens. as my colleague said, is actually the reverse exponential curve. So it’s two opposite curves. And the reason why I see my colleague from India, why I’m saying that is because of the cost of living crisis. The globing digital gap of our own personal survivability prevents us from really engaging and trusting because we have so many conflicts at the moment for our own survivability that is stopping us from doing this. So I look at governments and say, cautiously move forward. Don’t think that everybody’s going to come for capacity building. It won’t solve the adoption and internalization of that trust and relevance. Thank you.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you very much, Professor Abassi, for your words. You’re right. The rate of technological advances has been growing exponentially. And the rate of adoption of these technologies is not flat, but increasing in a very small way. And the gap has been widening between where technology is and the usage and adoption of the technology. I think fundamentally, digital transformation is about changing mindsets. It’s about changing behaviors. If we cannot really change the way we look at things through digital means, then of course, we’ll be only continuously improving the analog world and not moving to this paradigm shift that our panelists have talked about. The last question or remark.

Audience:
Well, I’m Cristina Cardenas. I’m in Coursera. So what she mentioned about the industry is doing a lot. But we are not doing enough to be related with the standards of UNESCO, for example, when we are training in artificial intelligence. We have a bunch of content that if we were able to make budgets aligned to the framework that you are going to launch for teachers and educators in June, I think that we could do more to measure what the countries are doing and in which level we are. So I think it’s a collaboration between the industry, the international organizations, the government. I used to work in the government. That’s why I understand that industry needs to connect with what you are doing. My question is, when are you going to officially launch the standards for artificial intelligence for educators and students? Because I hear that it was in June, but I’m not sure, and thank you.

Tawfik Jelassi:
Thank you very much. Let me say that we are about to launch that. We have, of course, the ICT competency framework for teachers and learners that is available already and a set of content material curricula that we have developed. I would like to announce that next February, 18 to 20, UNESCO is organizing in Paris at our headquarters, a global conference on digital transformation in the public sector. So we discussed for 60 minutes this topic, we’ll have three days to delve into this very important topic with an emphasis on capacity building of civil servants so they can succeed in the digital transformation. You are all invited to Paris next February 2025 if this conference is of interest to you. Also, I would like to briefly mention that UNESCO is launching a pledge towards building civil servants’ capability to succeed in digital transformation. My colleagues have information and leaflets, like the one I’m showing you here, about the UNESCO pledge for capacity building in digital transformation. Let me stop here because we are already over time. I would like to thank our distinguished panelists for their inputs and their insights. Thank you all for coming to this session. Enjoy the rest of WSIS 2024. All the best.