Russia’s economic and social sectors have expanded the use of AI solutions: Putin at Sber’s AI journey conference

Moscow: The AI Journey international conference hosted the main discussion, The Generative AI Revolution: New Opportunities, attended by President Vladimir Putin and moderated by Sberbank CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board Herman Gref. Putin said that “over the past year, Russia’s economic and social sectors have expanded the use of AI solutions by a factor of 1.5. Investments in this area are growing, and companies are solving their production tasks more and more efficiently thanks to AI.”

The application of AI can bring huge opportunities to the sphere of public administration. This is a complete transition to data-driven management, which will make it possible to automate even more administrative procedures and accelerate decision-making processes based on big data, which means radically improving and changing the appearance of many spheres that directly affect every citizen. However, Putin added “Artificial intelligence will not replace a medical worker or a teacher, but it can serve as their faithful and effective assistant; e.g., it can give teachers more time to educate children, help doctors prevent and detect diseases at an early stage, and be used for remote monitoring of people’s health.”

Putin also announced that a new version of the National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence will be approved in the near future, taking into account the rapid development of generative models.

Herman Gref added that another important task was to create trusted artificial intelligence. More advanced models are already able to point out that less advanced models have some flaws in the datasets and show how to solve these problems. In the same way, more advanced models can be used to solve the “black box” problem, i.e. to explain why the AI made this or that decision. He outlined three main areas in which AI, according to expert forecasts, will make the greatest breakthroughs: healthcare, education, and the construction of fundamentally new management systems. The following speakers focused on AI development prospects in these three areas.

At the end of the discussion, the President of the Russian Federation noted that Russia needed an AI evolution, but this evolution must be organized quickly, in a quality manner, efficiently, and affect all levels: businesses, municipalities, constituent entities of Russia, federal authorities, in all aspects of life. This is what we should aspire to achieve, and this goal requires concentration of all our intellectual, administrative and financial resources, if we want to secure the future of the country.