Building a new AI world: Russia begins another digital breakthrough
Russia has reached the stage of mass and widespread implementation of artificial intelligence in industries based on systemic federal initiatives, strategic educational programs and support for innovative developers. Now it is important to take up the ideas implemented in the regions for the development of AI and scale it to the whole country. Izvestia investigated how ready Russia is for a digital breakthrough and what lies behind the ambitious plans.
Neural jump
A new period of rapid introduction of artificial intelligence has begun in Russia, which promises to change the usual approaches in management, economics and education. The government has set an ambitious task not just to create technologies, but to scale the best regional practices and train world-class specialists.
— Artificial intelligence today is a tool that removes all unnecessary routine and allows you to replace it with automation. Our task is to take up the ideas already implemented in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation at the federal level and scale them to the whole country," Dmitry Grigorenko, Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Staff, told Izvestia.
The Artificial Intelligence Development Center, recently established at the Government's Analytical Center, will play an important role in this. The Deputy Prime Minister noted that a new project office has been created at the center, which coordinates the introduction and development of AI technologies, as well as deals with methods and standards.
As part of the national project "Data Economics and Digital Transformation of the state", universal standard solutions for system implementation in regional management are being developed in Russia. The prototype of such solutions is the already existing successful regional practices of using neural networks, which will be hosted on a single digital platform.
— For example, a universal solution for remote monitoring of economic activity will be developed. It can be used in several scenarios: detection, recognition and detection of illegal objects; control of the regulatory status of objects and negative consequences," the Deputy Prime Minister's office added.
Starting from the beginning of 2025, an important step in staffing the industry was the opening of an Educational Program Expertise Center based on the Analytical Center, which has already held competitions and selected 22 universities to train specialists in the field of AI and 26 in the field of IT.
Cadres decide everything
The Russian Ministry of Finance also highlights the growing number of IT personnel, including AI specialists.
"Over the past five years, the number of IT specialists, including in the field of artificial intelligence, has grown by 50% and reached 1.08 million people and continues to increase," the ministry's press service says.
At the same time, the Ministry of Finance has created and launched a TOP-AI training project this year. It provides for the training of students according to modern educational programs. By 2030, it is planned to train more than 10,000 specialists.
"Graduates of the programs will be able to participate in scientific research in the field of AI or independently conduct it, create new methods of training neural networks, design the architecture of world—class AI models, as well as adjust and retrain existing models, solve applied problems," the ministry noted.
The Ministry of Education and Science, in its commentary to Izvestia, highlights the importance of improving the quality and volume of educational programs in the field of artificial intelligence.
— From 2021 to 2024, more than 120 educational programs were developed at 16 leading universities, for which more than 600 million rubles of grant support were allocated. Currently, almost 15 thousand students are studying under these programs, including 10 thousand undergraduates," the press service of the Ministry of Education and Science notes.
Special attention is being paid to improving the skills of teachers: in 2024, more than 5,000 teachers have already been retrained in the field of AI.
Support for developers and startups in the field of artificial intelligence is provided by the Foundation for the Promotion of Innovation under the Government.
— The most popular Start — Artificial Intelligence competition allows authors and research teams to receive a grant of up to 5 million rubles for the development of their projects. With an investment of 1.7 billion rubles, government funds provided revenue of 4.5 billion rubles, and companies created about 700 jobs," said Sergey Polyakov, CEO of the fund.
This year, applications are being accepted within the framework of the federal project "Domestic Solutions", which stimulates start—ups in various fields - from industry to education and medicine.
Insights and challenges
"For the successful implementation of neural networks, companies must be even more active in modernizing their work processes, including automation of routine operations, data mining, participation in pilot projects and the development of rules for the safe use of technologies," said Senator and ASI expert Olga Epifanova.
Dmitry Markov, CEO of VisionLabs, is convinced that one of the basic conditions for the effective development of AI is the support of developers and favorable business conditions. It is important not only to create innovative technologies, but also to ensure their competitiveness at the international level.
An important role is played by the training of personnel capable of formulating competent queries and configuring AI solutions for specific industry tasks.
—Scaling is not the same as developing new AI systems, this procedure requires different resources and different approaches," says Alexander Bukhanovsky, director of the Megafacult of Translational Information Technologies at ITMO University.
Solving the issue of such personnel is no less important than the introduction of technology. And if the issue of developer training has now been successfully resolved, then there is no systematic training of qualified AI customers in the country, the expert points out. At the same time, such experts do not need to be taught in bachelor's and master's degrees — short-term additional professional education programs are sufficient for this, adds Alexander Bukhanovsky.
The Research Center at the University of Innopolis (Tatarstan) serves as a successful example of the integrated development of AI in Russia.
"For the active implementation of AI in Russia, a comprehensive development of infrastructure and regulatory framework is necessary," says Ramil Kuleev, director of Innopolis. — Our center has already registered 80 intellectual activity results, published 33 scientific studies in Q1 journals, developed six educational programs, opened an international laboratory with an Indian university, and implemented 83 commercial and grant projects worth 950 million rubles, including organ diagnostics services based on medical images and AI systems for industry.
The main obstacle to scaling technologies is the need for individual customization for each enterprise and the lack of universal tools available to specialists without advanced programming skills.
—The future belongs to Low-code and No-code systems that can make AI both accessible and useful,— says Alexander Bukhanovsky. — There are already similar examples in the Russian Federation: under the auspices of the NTI Platform, a tool environment for scaling computer vision systems is being developed.
Support for educational initiatives is actively developing both at the federal level and within industrial companies and universities.
"In order to scale the solutions already implemented in the regions to the federal level, we need to train a sufficient number of qualified specialists," agrees Evgenia Burnayeva, director of the Skoltech AI Center. According to her, as part of the national Data Economics program, the government has launched a series of competitions for the development of educational programs on AI, and Skoltech is forming master's and bachelor's degrees with modern trends and high competition, providing graduates with knowledge on transformers, generative models and multimodal systems.
Regional opportunities
Equally important is the issue of technical availability of resources for the regions.
"The government relies on platform solutions that provide regions with access to AI technologies without having to create their own expensive infrastructure," says Evgenia Burnayeva. — The platform of the Skoltech AI Center has already passed pilot operation, integration with government systems is underway.
The platform is currently undergoing an active implementation phase: application scenarios are being implemented, new functional modules are being developed, and external data sources are being connected. Next up are scenarios for detecting violations in the land and property sector, analyzing the state of infrastructure, monitoring the use of agricultural land, combating illegal landfills and logging, etc. One of the newest scenarios is automatic recognition of buildings and site boundaries based on UAV surveys and comparison with cadastral data, the expert clarifies.
Despite significant successes, the legislative framework is experiencing serious difficulties in adapting to the pace of innovation.
— The legislative framework is not ready for the rapid and safe implementation of AI in various industries, because there are still no standards. They are only in the decree of the President of the Russian Federation on the AI Development Strategy," says Sergey Smirnov, a leading researcher at the NSU Artificial Intelligence Center. — A draft Digital Code has been developed in Russia, but there is no open discussion yet.
According to him, there are only ethical standards and codes, but they are not legal acts. There is no clear concept of AI in the legislation, and there is a dispute between those who consider neural networks to be an agent with subjectivity and those who consider AI as a human tool. Without solving these conceptual issues, there will be no real law on artificial intelligence, the expert emphasizes.
In addition to the regulatory framework, the expert community points to the problem of financing and access to computing resources for the development and implementation of new solutions.
— The issue of personnel training is important, but not the primary one, — says Artem Preskaryan, Technical Director of SKB Kontur. — Financing of implementations and access to computing resources is much more important. Now the main achievements are being observed by large businesses, but in universities this issue needs to be approached with government support and partnership.
The issues of standards and criteria for the safety and ethics of AI also remain open, experts remind.
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