Speaking at the AI & Digital Bridge 2026 forum in Astana, Freedom Holding Corp. CEO Timur Turlov said AI agents built into digital ecosystems will give ordinary users the kind of personal assistant once reserved for top executives, Qazinform News Agency correspondent reports.
Turlov spoke at a plenary session titled "The Future of Finance, Technology, Capital and Opportunities," moderated by Elizaveta Osetinskaya, CEO and co-founder of The Bell. He said entrepreneurs create the most value not by inventing entirely new things, which he described as the work of scientists, but by adapting emerging technologies for practical use.
According to Turlov, Freedom's super app turned out to be well prepared for AI. It already provides single sign-on, payment rails and a trusted environment, which are among the main obstacles AI agents face when working with digital platforms. Within the app, he said, a user could ask one agent to buy a ticket, make a payment, send money to their mother or add a driver to a car insurance policy.
The same agent could also recommend a new film starring their favorite actor. "Previously, only the heads of the largest companies and the most senior officials could have highly qualified personal assistants. Now we are moving toward building a personal assistant that will help any person achieve roughly the same quality of life," Turlov said.
He added that the company's engineers are developing speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech models. According to Turlov, results not yet published show the best benchmark scores in Kazakh and in mixed Kazakh-Russian speech. Turlov argued that companies must keep direct contact with customers.
He warned that businesses pushed down into the infrastructure layer quickly become commoditized and operate on minimal margins. In his view, the ability to win consumer trust and to cover the risks of agent errors will become a key source of value. "This trust will probably be one of the most valuable and important commodities," he said.
Turlov described digital ecosystems as a new form of monopoly. He said digital products have removed the inefficiencies that once limited the growth of large financial institutions, so more customers now translate into better products. He noted that three ecosystems and about five mid-sized banks currently compete for users in Kazakhstan, and predicted rapid consolidation in finance over the next decade, leading to a concentrated oligopoly of global digital banks.
"Roughly speaking, if you live in America and the world's best bank in terms of technology and capabilities is in Kazakhstan, why would you use an American bank?" he said. Asked about a possible AI bubble, Turlov said there is currently no overproduction of data centers.
"Demand greatly exceeds supply," he said. He added that demand for the company's first NVIDIA-based data center already stands at 200% of the capacity built. Several major offtakers have offered to take that capacity for five years at a premium price. He said Freedom's ecosystem has 6 million users, about 3.5 million of whom use it daily.
Much of the state's computing needs will have to be met domestically, he said, because financial and government data cannot be processed abroad for regulatory reasons. Turlov called national computing capacity "the new gold and foreign currency reserve." He said that once the data center is complete, Kazakhstan would hold roughly 90% of Central Asia's computing power.