The central focus is to leverage AI to promote social and economic development, create a digital society, and improve the quality of life for all citizens.
Egypt has released the second edition of its National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy for Buildings, based on an initial strategy launched in 2021, between 2025 and 2030. The new plan aims to establish Egypt as a regional leader in AI and an influential global player. The central focus is to leverage AI to promote social and economic development, create a digital society, and improve the quality of life for all citizens.
A comprehensive vision of strategy, “Comprehensive AI to nurture Digital Egypt,” seeks to promote the development of all Egyptians. Its mission is to “create an AI industry supported by governance, technology, data, infrastructure, ecosystems and talent, ensuring sustainability and competitiveness with the aim of promoting Egypt's development.” This document provides an overview of six strategic goals. Establishing an ethical and responsible AI framework, improving quality of life through AI, ensuring data accessibility and sharing, building a robust AI infrastructure, fostering a healthy AI ecosystem, and developing local AI talent.
This strategy sets specific goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to be achieved by 2030. The ICT sector is projected to donate 7.7% to Egypt's GDP. AI tools are expected to benefit 26% of the workforce, and 36% of the public will be able to access AI-powered products in their daily lives within the next five years. The plan also aims to increase the number of AI experts to 30,000 and double the annual number of AI academic publications to 6,000. Additionally, the strategy will support the establishment of over 250 successful AI companies in Egypt.
To achieve these goals, the strategy is built on six foundation pillars. The governance pillar focuses on creating regulatory systems that include AI laws and centres of responsible AI. The technology pillar aims to develop basic national models and utilize large-scale language models for a variety of industries. The data pillars recognized as “fuels for AI algorithms” include comprehensive data strategies and open data platforms. The pillars of ICT and AI infrastructure are dedicated to building scalable infrastructures, including advanced data centers and cloud services. The ecosystem pillar supports the AI industry through an active investment environment and collaboration platform. Finally, Talents Pillar focuses on developing and attracting AI experts through a variety of initiatives.
This strategy acknowledges the rapid evolution of AI, particularly the emergence of large-scale models and generation AI, and recognizes that being competitive in this sector is important for Egyptian national ambitions. The Implementation Roadmap highlights the importance of “strategic AI funding” to support these advances. This document highlights Egypt's progress, highlighting the 52nd place ranking in Tortoise Media's Global AI Index 2024 and a major jump in the 49-spot government AI Readiness Index from 2019 to 2023.
