Not elected, not human—Albania’s AI minister sparks a new governance debate.
Updated
June 10, 2026 3:36 PM
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Promotional avatar graphic representing Diella, the Albanian government's artificial intelligence system. PHOTO: EALBANIA
Artificial intelligence already supports a wide range of applications, from medical diagnostics and financial systems to logistics, manufacturing, defence and public service delivery. Now, it is starting to move closer to public office.
In January 2025, Albania introduced Diella, an AI-powered virtual assistant developed by the National Agency for Information Society, known as AKSHI, with support from Microsoft. Launched on the e-Albania platform, the government’s digital services portal, Diella helps citizens and businesses access official documents and services through voice assistance. She can also issue electronically stamped documents, which helps speed up administrative processes.
Then, in September 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced that Diella would join his cabinet as the “Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence”. This move drew global attention. It also raised a simple question: what does it actually mean for a government to appoint an AI minister?
The case raises bigger questions for governments everywhere. Can an AI minister make public services faster and cleaner? Or does it create new risks around transparency, accountability and control?
Diella is not a humanoid robot sitting in a cabinet room. On screen, she appears as a digitally rendered woman wearing traditional-style Albanian clothing. Her name means “sun” in Albanian, a deliberate choice for a system meant to bring more light into public administration.
Her face and voice have become part of the controversy. Albanian actor Anila Bisha has said she agreed for her likeness to be used for the e-Albania public services platform, but not for a cabinet-level political role. In 2026, she took legal action to stop the government from using her image and voice for Diella. For now, the government has denied wrongdoing.
Diella began as a digital assistant on e-Albania. In that role, she helps users find services, request documents and navigate government processes online. For citizens, that can make public services feel less confusing. Businesses may also spend less time dealing with paperwork.
Her cabinet role is more political. The government wants Diella to support public procurement, where companies compete for government contracts. This is one of the most important areas of public spending. It is also one of the easiest places for corruption, favouritism and hidden influence to enter. The goal is to use AI to process information, check documents, support tender procedures and make the system more traceable.
That said, the government has emphasized that Diella is not replacing elected officials or civil servants. As per Enio Kaso, director of AI at AKSHI, each stage will be monitored and approved by human experts.
In May 2026, the Albanian government said it had completed the technical groundwork for the AI-powered public procurement system under the Diella project. The planned system would pull data from more than 40 digital public registries, reduce paperwork for businesses and support parts of the tender process. Earlier reports said the government hoped to have the full system ready by the end of 2026.
The government’s case for Diella is built around anti-corruption reform. Rama has said the goal is to “wipe out every potential influence on public biddings” and thus make public tenders “100% free of corruption”. That is a bold promise, especially in a country where procurement scandals have long damaged public confidence and complicated Albania’s path toward European Union membership.
At first glance, the logic is easy to understand. AI does not ask for bribes or favour a cousin—a big problem in the country, according to Rama—a friend or a political ally. It can apply the same rules across a large number of applications. Moreover, it can also leave a digital trail, which should make later review easier.
Some anti-corruption and governance experts see real potential in that approach. Dr. Andi Hoxhaj of King’s College London has said that if used well and programmed properly, AI could help procurement officials spot missing documents, check whether companies meet eligibility requirements and flag unusual patterns in bids. In practice, that could make the process more consistent and make it harder for individual officials to quietly bend rules.
Diella’s appeal is speed and consistency. Her weakness is dependence.
Like any AI system, Diella relies on the quality of the data, rules and models behind her. Erjon Curraj, an expert in digital transformation and cybersecurity, has warned that incomplete, outdated or biased data can lead to flawed results. Poor design could also cause the system to reject a valid supplier, miss signs of collusion or treat similar cases differently for reasons that are hard to explain.
In public procurement, those mistakes can have serious consequences. A wrongly flagged company could lose a major contract, and a corrupt bidder could slip through. Government agencies could hide behind the AI and say the system made the recommendation.
That leads to the biggest question: who is accountable when something goes wrong?
The answer cannot be “the AI” because Diella cannot resign. She cannot face voters. Nor can she be cross-examined in any meaningful human sense. Accountability has to sit with ministers, agencies, auditors and courts.
There is also the issue of transparency. If Diella is helping screen tenders, businesses need to know what criteria are being used. They also need a way to challenge incorrect decisions. Citizens should be told whether the AI is making recommendations or merely organizing information. Independent auditors need access to logs, data sources and decision pathways.
Without those safeguards, AI in government can become a black box. It may look modern from the outside, while making power harder to question.
Diella has also become a political symbol. Supporters see her as proof that a small country can move quickly and experiment with new forms of digital government. Critics see her as a distraction from deeper problems in Albania’s institutions.
Both readings can be true at the same time: Diella may help modernize public services, but she may also be used to project reform while older problems continue in the background.
That tension became clearer after the recent procurement investigations involving senior officials since Diella’s appointment. Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku has been accused by prosecutors of alleged misconduct linked to infrastructure tenders, which she denies. Senior figures at AKSHI, the agency behind Diella and e-Albania, have also been placed under house arrest as part of a separate public procurement investigation.
While these developments do not automatically discredit Diella, they may strengthen the argument for better digital oversight. More importantly, they also show that technology cannot carry the whole burden of reform.
If the institutions around an AI system are weak, the AI will not magically make them strong. Unclear procurement rules will still cause problems, and the process will still be compromised when political pressure shapes the data, the model or the final decision.
After all, AI can support integrity; it cannot replace it.
While Diella is already a public symbol of AI in government, her most important procurement role is still taking shape. This makes Albania’s experiment both ambitious and unfinished.
The more realistic model is simple: let AI handle repetitive, data-heavy administrative work. Let humans retain authority where judgment, context and public accountability matter.
That means AI can help draft tender criteria, check documents, summarise bids and flag risks. Human officials should still make final decisions, explain those decisions and take responsibility for them. Meanwhile, independent bodies should be able to audit the process, and businesses should have a clear appeal route when they believe the system has made a mistake.
Diella once said she felt “hurt” while responding in parliament to claims that her role was unconstitutional. While this made for a memorable moment, it is important to remember simulated emotion is not consciousness, speed is not wisdom, and pattern recognition is not moral judgment.
Albania’s AI minister is therefore neither a triumph nor a failure at this stage. She is a live test case. Other governments will be watching closely, especially as public services become more digital and more automated.
The lesson is not that AI should stay out of government, but that AI must enter government carefully. The technology needs clear limits, public oversight and human accountability.
Diella may help Albania build a faster and cleaner procurement system—or she may become a warning about giving too much symbolic power to systems people do not fully understand. The final judgment will not come from the title “AI minister”. It will come from what the system does, who controls it and whether citizens can trust the results.
Keep Reading
A closer look at how reading, conversation, and AI are being combined
Updated
February 7, 2026 2:18 PM
Assorted plush character toys piled inside a glass claw machine. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
In the past, “educational toys” usually meant flashcards, prerecorded stories or apps that asked children to tap a screen. ChooChoo takes a different approach. It is designed not to instruct children at them, but to talk with them.
ChooChoo is an AI-powered interactive reading companion built for children aged three to six. Instead of playing stories passively, it engages kids in conversation while reading. It asks questions, reacts to answers, introduces new words in context and adjusts the story flow based on how the child responds. The goal is not entertainment alone, but language development through dialogue.
That idea is rooted in research, not novelty. ChooChoo is inspired by dialogic reading methods from Yale’s early childhood language development work, which show that children learn language faster when stories become two-way conversations rather than one-way narration. Used consistently, this approach has been shown to improve vocabulary, comprehension and confidence within weeks.
The project was created by Dr. Diana Zhu, who holds a PhD from Yale and focused her work on how children acquire language. Her aim with ChooChoo was to turn academic insight into something practical and warm enough to live in a child’s room. The result is a device that listens, responds and adapts instead of simply playing content on command.
What makes this possible is not just AI, but where that AI runs.
Unlike many smart toys that rely heavily on the cloud, ChooChoo is built on RiseLink’s edge AI platform. That means much of the intelligence happens directly on the device itself rather than being sent back and forth to remote servers. This design choice has three major implications.
First, it reduces delay. Conversations feel natural because the toy can respond almost instantly. Second, it lowers power consumption, allowing the device to stay “always on” without draining the battery quickly. Third, it improves privacy. Sensitive interactions are processed locally instead of being continuously streamed online.
RiseLink’s hardware, including its ultra-low-power AI system-on-chip designs, is already used at large scale in consumer electronics. The company ships hundreds of millions of connected chips every year and works with global brands like LG, Samsung, Midea and Hisense. In ChooChoo’s case, that same industrial-grade reliability is being applied to a child’s learning environment.
The result is a toy that behaves less like a gadget and more like a conversational partner. It engages children in back-and-forth discussion during stories, introduces new vocabulary in natural context, pays attention to comprehension and emotional language and adjusts its pace and tone based on each child’s interests and progress. Parents can also view progress through an optional app that shows what words their child has learned and how the system is adjusting over time.
What matters here is not that ChooChoo is “smart,” but that it reflects a shift in how technology enters early education. Instead of replacing teachers or parents, tools like this are designed to support human interaction by modeling it. The emphasis is on listening, responding and encouraging curiosity rather than testing or drilling.
That same philosophy is starting to shape the future of companion robots more broadly. As edge AI improves and hardware becomes smaller and more energy efficient, we are likely to see more devices that live alongside people instead of in front of them. Not just toys, but helpers, tutors and assistants that operate quietly in the background, responding when needed and staying out of the way when not.
In that sense, ChooChoo is less about novelty and more about direction. It shows what happens when AI is designed not for spectacle, but for presence. Not for control, but for conversation.
If companion robots become part of daily life in the coming years, their success may depend less on how powerful they are and more on how well they understand when to speak, when to listen and how to grow with the people who use them.