AICA head on why Tashkent should host UNIDO's AI Centre of Excellence

The global economy has entered a phase in which artificial intelligence is no longer simply a digital technology but a determinant of industrial competitiveness among nations. For decades, states competed for natural resources, manufacturing capacity and logistics routes. Today, what matters most is access to intelligent technologies, data and skilled talent.

International organisations estimate that adopting artificial intelligence could add trillions of dollars to the world economy each year, but uneven capture of the gains remains a problem. Most developing countries remain consumers of these technologies rather than their creators. Closing that gap is the central purpose of the Alliance on Artificial Intelligence for Industry and Manufacturing (AIM Global), an initiative run by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). Its network of Centres of Excellence has become the practical instrument for achieving this goal.

From declarations to industrial solutions

Launched in 2023, AIM Global has quickly evolved from an expert-led initiative into a global platform for international cooperation. Its first Centre of Excellence opened in Shanghai during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in 2024. A year later, at the AIM Global conference in Xiamen, the programme announced its move into a second phase under the telling banner “From Alliance to Solutions.”

That shift marks a genuinely new mode of operation. The first phase focused on building an international community, drafting principles for AI governance, and assembling a network of partners. The current phase focuses on putting the technology to work directly on factory floors. The emphasis has moved away from digital services as such and toward raising enterprise productivity, cutting energy use, optimising production processes and training a new generation of engineers.

Why regional centres are becoming central to industrial policy

What distinguishes the AIM Global model is that its Centres of Excellence are not conventional research institutes. They function instead as integration platforms that combine several strands of activity at once:

international cooperation;

the deployment of AI in industry;

the training of engineers and specialists;

the development of standards and regulatory approaches;

support for small and medium-sized enterprises;

the mobilisation of investment;

and the running of pilot projects.

In effect, each centre serves as the nucleus of a regional digital-industry ecosystem.

The experience of China and India suggests that such platforms become magnets for expertise, around which innovation clusters subsequently form. India’s “hub and spoke” model is particularly instructive: a central hub coordinates a large number of regional nodes, giving small and medium-sized enterprises access to modern technology they could not otherwise reach. For developing economies, this structure helps avoid a familiar pitfall: digital capability is concentrated solely in capital-city research centres, which are out of reach for the rest of the country.

Why Tashkent

Given the pace at which AIM Global is expanding, it is a natural moment to ask whether Central Asia should have its own regional Centre of Excellence — and Tashkent has several concrete advantages to offer.

Uzbekistan has pursued a consistent state policy of digital transformation recently: sweeping industrial reforms, the development of modern industrial zones, the growth of IT Park Uzbekistan, rising exports of digital services, and the steady rollout of e-government and digital administration.

Geography matters just as much. Uzbekistan sits at the natural transport and economic crossroads of Central Asia, linking the markets of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, while forging new connections to South Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East. A regional AIM Global centre based in Tashkent could realistically serve a market far larger than Uzbekistan’s own economy, effectively building intelligent infrastructure for all of Central Asia.

What Uzbekistan stands to gain

The value of hosting a Centre of Excellence extends well beyond AI adoption itself. It would mean access to UNIDO’s global network of experts and leading technology companies worldwide, participation in international research projects and pilot deployments, the chance to train national specialists to common international standards, and access to financing through the AIM Trust Fund. It would also, not incidentally, make the country markedly more attractive to investors: international experience shows that large technology firms are far more willing to localise projects where scientific partners, trained personnel and institutional support already exist.

A new impetus for Central Asian industry

Across Central Asia, most enterprises are small or medium-sized producers, and they feel the technology gap especially acutely. Firms of this size typically have no research divisions of their own and struggle to find qualified specialists in digital transformation. A regional AIM Global centre could serve as a technology bridge between the world’s AI developers and the region’s industrial base — a role that matters most in sectors such as logistics, textiles, agro-industry, chemicals, mining, metallurgy and energy. In each of these, AI is already demonstrating that it can cut production costs substantially and improve how resources are used.

Education as the pillar of technological sovereignty

One of AIM Global’s strongest features is that it treats human capital as being just as important as technology. The programme’s second phase includes joint master’s degree programmes, engineering schools, international internships and training for civil servants. For Uzbekistan, where the number of engineering and IT students grows every year, such a centre could become the platform on which a new generation of world-class specialists is trained — not only programmers, but also engineers, technologists, production managers, logisticians and enterprise leaders.

Central Asia could join the global network of industrial AI

The AIM Global network already spans China and India and is preparing to expand into Africa, Eastern Europe, the Arab world and Latin America. In this emerging map, Central Asia remains one of the few major regions without a Centre of Excellence of its own. Establishing one in Tashkent would close that gap and integrate the region into the architecture of global industrial AI now taking shape. It would also allow Uzbekistan to become not merely a recipient of technology, but one of the centres that helps set the international agenda for digital industrialisation.

Time to act

Artificial intelligence is increasingly treated as a matter of national competitiveness. But in industry, what ultimately determines outcomes is not any single technology but the institutions that bring together government, business, science and education – precisely the function that AIM Global’s UNIDO Centres of Excellence are designed to perform.

For Uzbekistan, establishing a regional centre in Tashkent would be more than just another international project; it would represent a strategic investment in the country’s long-term technological development. It would reinforce the republic’s position as a leader of digital transformation in Central Asia, accelerate the adoption of AI across industry, and strengthen the competitiveness of the national economy.

As a new global technological architecture takes shape, centres of this kind are becoming more than sites for transferring knowledge — they are instruments of economic diplomacy, international cooperation and sustainable industrial growth. That is why the initiative to establish a regional AIM Global Centre of Excellence in Tashkent matters not only for Uzbekistan but for the whole of Central Asia.