As Kazakhstan expands the use of artificial intelligence, Olaf J. Groth sees an opportunity for the country to turn its natural resources, industrial assets and geographic position into a stronger role in the global economy. In an exclusive interview with Qazinform News Agency, the founding CEO of Cambrian Futures and member of Kazakhstan’s Council for the Development of Artificial Intelligence discusses how to turn AI investment into practical benefits, protect citizens through clear rules, and help Kazakh entrepreneurs compete internationally.
Global investment in AI is at an all-time high, yet many markets are struggling to see a clear return on investment. In your view, what usually prevents these massive capital flows from turning into practical, everyday benefits for businesses and citizens? The biggest obstacle to achieving a return on investment is the human and organizational factor.
We are failing to transform organizations as quickly as technology develops. You could also say that technology is developing too quickly for people and organizations to adapt. Institutions, including rules, customs, legal frameworks, processes, procedures and structures, change very slowly.
We are having trouble keeping pace. We need to rethink how we communicate, make decisions and build things, as well as the processes and structures that support those activities. That takes time. We need more leaders who focus on managing change and organizational transformation.
We also need to become better at experimenting thoughtfully. That means understanding why we are experimenting, how we conduct experiments and how we measure the results. We need to combine open-minded discovery and blue-sky thinking with ways to capture and assess what we find.
When experiments produce positive results, we need to put them on a pathway toward a return on investment. People are sometimes reluctant to measure what they are experimenting with, but you can be both free-spirited and disciplined about measuring your discoveries.
These transformations take time, and we are now in a race against time because we are on a pathway toward spending $10 trillion over the next couple of years. That investment needs to generate returns. Otherwise, those providing the capital may decide to slow down or stop funding, which would be the worst outcome.
I helped introduce Minister Zhaslan Madiyev to OpenAI, and they were very interested in what Kazakhstan had already built. I believe you had developed a model with 180 billion parameters in Kazakh, Russian and English. OpenAI was interested because that could allow a partner like OpenAI to train its own models in your languages.
That is a good start, but Kazakhstan has much more to offer. It has tremendous natural resource wealth. It is an agricultural nation that can feed up to 400 million people. For much of its recent history, it has also been a logistics hub and a transit route for trade.
Think about the space economy and Baikonur as well. Kazakhstan needs to bring those assets to its partners because the future is physical AI. AI will extend beyond digital systems and text-based understanding to interacting with the real world, including the natural and built environments.