Crossed Wires: Meet Diella, Albania’s AI answer to tender fraud

One of the most surprising stories to emerge from the world of technology and e-government in recent weeks came from Albania. 

Unless you are Albanian, the country may not appear particularly newsworthy. What most people know about Albania is that it is somewhere in Eastern Europe, its name begins with an A and it is famous for, well, not very much. We might also dimly remember that it was once an awful, corrupt, autocratic, hermetic dictatorship – and now it isn’t. Oh, and apparently it’s a cheap place to go for a Mediterranean holiday.

So, it provoked considerable surprise when on 11 September Prime Minister Edi Rama announced the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in charge of public procurement. Her name is Diella, and her persona is a traditionally attired woman with a wise yet beautiful countenance, presumably generated by AI.

Notwithstanding the announcement, Diella isn’t actually a minister because Albania’s constitution requires flesh-and-blood humans to hold these offices. Her appointment was a clever marketing ploy designed to attract global attention to an AI application, an earlier version of which has already successfully interacted with citizens on more prosaic e-government matters. If Diella can do the job of clean procurement better than a human minister, who cares about her legal title?

During a much darker period of Albania’s history, when it was ruled by Enver Hoxha from 1944 to 1985, the country was, by all accounts, a nasty place where the fiscus was freely raided by cronies of the ruling party and dissent was quickly and brutally crushed. In other words, it was a vicious and unconstrained kleptocracy. The arrival of multiparty democracy was somewhat miraculous but, once corruption is embedded in the DNA of governance, even democratic governance, it is extremely difficult to root out. Transparency International publishes a list of such corrupt democracies, ignominiously led by Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia.

The most common form of corruption occurs in the awarding of government tenders (at all levels – national, state and local). There is a huge pot of cash, mostly derived from taxpayer contributions, called the fiscus. Every year, the government checks what is in the pot and develops a budget to spend it, often in consultation with stakeholders lower down the political chain. Money is then loaded onto various trains that find their way to various government operations where it is spent according to the budget.

This is where the corruption gap opens, because the actual work that needs doing (road maintenance, boots for soldiers, buildings for schools, water pipes, driving licences, mobile phones for government workers) is most often undertaken by private companies with the requisite product or expertise. Hence, a tsunami of tenders is created every year, at every level of value and enterprise imaginable.

Tenders are supposed to work like this: articulate the requirements clearly, publish the tender, choose the lowest bidder who ticks the right boxes.

If only it were that simple. There are humans involved at every point in public procurement, all with their own biases, preferences, cousins, friends, uncles and sometimes a penchant for kickbacks. Tenders can be designed specifically for a single company, lies and exaggerations can be hidden in tender responses, and adjudicators can be swayed, ignored or threatened. Unless every participant in this game is scrupulous, fair, honest and determined, there is going to be corruption – it is pretty much a given.

Enter Diella. She has already been hard at work for some time, assisting citizens with filling in government paperwork such as passport applications, with millions of transactions under her digital belt. This latest incarnation is merely a promotion. She is being put to work with one single goal: to eliminate corruption in the public tender process.

According to her creators at the Albanian National Agency for Information Society, Diella is powered by Microsoft's language models. This means she can understand and chat in conversational Albanian, processing complex tender documents with the ease of an experienced bureaucrat, and significantly faster. She's designed to be immune to political pressure, nepotism and the persuasive power of an envelope full of cash. Her only bias is towards the rules she’s been given.

Unfortunately, there is little information about how the system actually works and what risks or liabilities may be lurking within its design. That’s acceptable if this is a harbinger of AI being widely employed to eradicate human malfeasance in the awarding of tenders. Albania’s innovation should be applauded and supported. Whether it works fairly the first time is less important than whether it can be improved and upgraded to perform better. It is computer code, so presumably it can, while it is evident that humans seem much less amenable to continuous improvement and upgrade, given the sorry and ubiquitous history of tender fraud.

There is, of course, a danger that the system will be inflexible in a world that is dynamic and messy. Perhaps. But Albania is betting that a little technological tyranny is a fair price to pay for clean government – something it has never known. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book "It's Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership" is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.