Tokayev Tasks New AI and Digital Development Minister With Building a Digital State
17:00, 29 September 2025
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev received the newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister - Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, Zhaslan Madiyev. The Head of State set a clear mandate: scale national digital infrastructure, integrate AI across priority sectors, and raise the bar for citizen and business digital services.
The President also called out a core constraint-talent. Training skilled professionals in AI and digital technologies is a national priority, alongside broader international cooperation and positioning Kazakhstan as a regional digital hub.
What was decided
- Upgrade and secure national digital infrastructure.
- Adopt AI in key sectors of the economy and social services.
- Improve quality, reliability, and accessibility of government digital services.
- Develop a strong pipeline of AI and digital talent.
- Expand international cooperation in high technology.
- Advance the goal from the President's Address: move Kazakhstan toward a digital state.
Why this matters for engineers, data teams, and product leaders
- Expect more API-first government platforms and interoperability standards. Plan for integrations with digital ID, payments, registries, and compliance layers.
- Sector AI adoption will need MLOps, model governance, and secure data pipelines. Prepare for audits, monitoring, and risk controls.
- Talent initiatives will favor practical skills: data engineering, ML engineering, AI product, security, and privacy-by-design.
- International cooperation may open pilot programs, sandboxes, and cross-border projects. Keep solution architectures modular and standards-aligned.
Execution priorities to watch
- Digital public infrastructure: identity, consent, payments, registries, and messaging rails.
- AI in high-impact domains: healthcare triage, education analytics, transport/urban systems, public safety, and SME services.
- Trust and safety: data protection, model risk management, content provenance, and incident response.
- Service quality: uptime SLAs, mobile-first UX, accessibility, and clear service catalogs for developers.
Context
The appointment of Zhaslan Madiyev as Deputy Prime Minister - Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development formalizes the state's focus on AI-led modernization. The directive emphasizes infrastructure, AI deployment, service quality, talent, and international reach as integrated workstreams.
Source: Akorda (Presidential Administration)
Practical next steps for teams
- Audit data readiness: lineage, quality, access controls, and retention policies.
- Standardize MLOps: versioning, CI/CD for models, monitoring, and rollback procedures.
- Align architectures to open standards and security baselines to ease future integrations with public platforms.
- Upskill: prioritize AI engineering, data governance, and secure software development.
For structured upskilling by role, see curated programs: AI courses by job role.
Bottom line: The brief is clear and execution-focused. Build for interoperability, invest in AI delivery discipline, and develop teams that can ship secure, high-availability digital services at national scale.
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