UK and Bahrain pilot AI procurement guidelines across government

Bahrain will pilot new guidelines for the procurement of Artificial Intelligence in the public sector, produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 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.

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 spurred the Centre 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 of the 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.”

Murat Sonmez, Head of the Centre and Managing Board member said:

“Last year at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions, we announced that the Forum and the UK government would build the world’s first AI procurement policy. Bahrain’s decision to pilot the framework demonstrates the Centre Network’s unique ability to accelerate and scale innovative ways to govern emerging technology. We are looking forward to rolling the framework out to more partners around the world.”

Thanks to its innovative, flexible and often pioneering regulation, Bahrain has come to be viewed as the Middle East’s testbed for the governance and regulation of emerging technologies. All of the Bahrain government has recently moved to the cloud, and the Kingdom is a pioneer in eGovernment services.

In 2017 Bahrain launched the region’s first regulatory sandbox allowing FinTechs using AI technology to test and scale new products and services, and in 2018 launched FinTech Bay, one of the leading FinTech hubs in the Middle East. Bahrain is also one of first countries in the world with a fully operational commercial 5G network. The Kingdom was one of the first to mandate open banking, which came into force last month, and is also a leader in the regulation of cryptocurrencies - in February 2019 the Central Bank of Bahrain introduced ground-breaking new rules on Crypto-asset services and Crypto-asset exchanges.