Kazakhstan Offers AI Rulebook, UN Center to Neighbors
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Kazakhstan unveils its AI rulebook & UN-backed Digital Solutions Centre, offering a template for regional AI governance & digital transformation.
At the 13th World Urban Forum in Baku, Kazakhstan offered its new AI rulebook and a UN-backed digital solutions center to its neighbors, signaling a significant push for regional cooperation in artificial intelligence governance. According to government officials, Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov highlighted three core assets to facilitate this: a comprehensive AI law, a national decree promoting digitalization and artificial intelligence, and the newly opened UN ESCAP Digital Solutions Centre in Almaty, which will serve as a hub for sharing these resources.
This initiative aims to promote the fair and safe use of artificial intelligence, particularly in housing and urban development. By sharing its legal framework and digital tools, Kazakhstan hopes to help neighboring countries improve public services and provide better housing for their citizens.
What is Kazakhstan's new AI rulebook and how can other countries use it?
According to government reports, Kazakhstan's AI rulebook provides a legal framework for fair and transparent AI. Through its UN ESCAP Digital Solutions Centre in Almaty, the country offers regional partners access to this framework, digital tools, and training for urban planning and public service automation.
Government sources indicate that the legislation sets out core principles for AI use, including fairness and equality, transparency and explainability of algorithms, accountability and oversight, data protection and privacy, and the security and reliability of AI systems.
Oversight covers the entire AI lifecycle. Before deployment, owners must maintain technical documentation, conduct regular security audits, and publish clear terms of use. Operators face penalties for failing to use human review in decisions affecting housing, credit, or public benefits. To build capacity, according to industry reports, an AI governance programme is training civil servants, and the government plans to publish a list of priority sectors for AI adoption.
The ESCAP Digital Solutions Centre in Almaty provides a second mechanism for regional collaboration. According to government sources, the centre has been endorsed by ESCAP member states and is supported by significant Kazakh funding over several years. Its dual mandate is to accelerate green digital transformation across Central Asia and serve as a sub-regional hub for the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway. Initial projects include municipal e-services toolkits, open-source flood-risk dashboards using satellite and IoT data, and a regional fibre-resilience map to maintain connectivity for land-locked nations during emergencies.
| Centre pillar | Key deliverables | Target users |
|---|---|---|
| Accelerator | Green digital transformation playbooks | SPECA energy ministries |
| Coordinator | Cross-border fibre outage tracker | Telcos + regulators |
| Solutions node | Open-source urban-data platform | Smaller cities |
Private-sector adoption is advancing concurrently. According to industry reports, regional Salesforce integrators have deployed numerous enterprise solutions in Kazakhstan, incorporating AI micro-modules for customer scoring and predictive after-sales service while ensuring data remains on-shore to comply with local privacy laws. In a key case study, telecom operator Tele2 merged its billing and network logs in a Tableau-Salesforce stack, significantly reducing campaign-planning time. This example is often used by officials to illustrate AI's potential for urban planning.
According to UN reports, billions of people today are living in inadequate housing conditions, while many millions have no home at all.
The Baku Call to Action, the forum's final agreement, encourages governments to integrate digital tools into housing, land registry, and climate adaptation efforts. Kazakhstan's delegation demonstrated how its new AI law and the ESCAP centre enable cities to:
- Automate building permit risk assessments using seismic and heat-zone data.
- Deploy AI-assisted eligibility engines for affordable-housing waitlists.
- Share synthetic, labeled datasets for startups to train models without cross-border transfers of personal data.
While regional adoption of the Kazakh model is yet to be confirmed, the foundational elements are in place: an active law, a UN-backed implementation hub in Almaty, and a growing portfolio of local pilot projects that can be exported as plug-and-play solutions.