Bahrain has announced it will pilot new guidelines for the procurement of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector.
The announcement was made by WEF and the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) – the public agency tasked with attracting investment to the Kingdom – at the WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, China.
According to WEF, AI has huge potential to streamline and transform service delivery for governments. However, due to lack of understanding and concerns over complexity, public institutions are often wary of adopting AI and lack the knowledge needed to successfully implement the technology.
This then prompted the WEF Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution to announce in 2017 that it would bring governments, businesses, start-ups and civil society together to co-design guidelines to empower governments to responsibly and sustainably deploy AI technology.
It partnered with the UK government to help design the guidelines and assess them in real-world conditions. Bahrain will join the UK in piloting the framework and providing feedback.
Khalid Al Rumaihi, chief executive officer, EDB, said, “When it comes to the governance and regulation of emerging technologies, Bahrain has earned a reputation as the Middle East’s testbed thanks to its innovative regulatory framework, strong technology ecosystem and rapid shift to eGovernment. AI can deliver huge benefits to citizens, but it needs a robust framework for successful implementation, and this project with WEF will build a global knowledge-base that can be used by other governments to sustainably and responsibly introduce AI across their public sector institutions.”
The announcement comes at a time when the government has made headways in the move to the cloud, and the Kingdom rolling out eGovernment services.
In 2017 Bahrain launched the region’s first regulatory sandbox allowing FinTechs to test and scale new technology products and services, and in 2018 launched FinTech Bay, one of the leading FinTech hubs in the Middle East.
The Gulf nation is also among the first countries in the world with a fully operational commercial 5G network. It also mandated open banking, which came into force last month, and is making significant advancements in cryptocurrency regulation. In February 2019 the Central Bank of Bahrain introduced new rules on Crypto-asset services and Crypto-asset exchanges.
