Challenges for Dominican Republic in the face of growing Artificial Intelligence capabilities

While the Dominican Republic is among the countries lagging in investment in artificial intelligence, other nations have assigned regulatory roles to this technology.

This is the case in Albania, which has just appointed AI “Diella” as Minister of Public Procurement, to ensure that tenders are “100% incorruptible” and expenditures are “100% legible” for the public.

These steps show a trend: your governments are creating important roles for AI, which can be revolutionary and make governments more efficient, but it also increases risks: giving machines human functions is inherently high risk, but these risks are greater when we assign them public functions.

The challenge this represents for the Dominican Republic is significant because the problem is not only that this trend forces the country to invest in technology to overcome its lag, but that this must be accompanied by the talent required to manage this technology and regulations that mitigate the risks.

In particular, the country must prepare to prevent the technological and governance gap from widening.

Failure to do what is necessary in these areas could lead the country to become even more dependent on external standards imposed by technological powers.

Furthermore, we must ensure that, as AI begins to improve efficiency in public and private management in other countries (from tax administration to industrial policy), the competitiveness gap does not widen to our detriment. This means that, in trade, foreign investment, and talent attraction, the country could lose appeal compared to countries that already use AI to accelerate processes, reduce costs, and generate predictability.

As wisdom warns, the times give it the strength of the unquestionable: “The country advances with weary steps in a race where artificial intelligence is already a hurricane’s wind, and it fears that, by staying in its wake, it will not be able to reap the rewards or avoid the storms.”