Albania installs AI bot as minister of procurement, in effort to end corruption in contract awarding

When Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama announced that his newest cabinet member would be “Diella,” an artificial intelligence bot, it was easy to dismiss the move as Balkan political theater.

But in Albania, the debate has quickly turned to whether the world’s first AI government minister can succeed in curbing the country’s chronic corruption problems – and whether she represents an uncomfortable glimpse of what the future may hold.

Governments around the world are struggling with deciding on the role machines should play in the future. Albania, one of Europe’s youngest democracies, is making its voice heard.

Diella, programmed to look like a 30-something woman dressed in traditional Albanian folk attire, is a large-language-model chatbot who heads the country’s Ministry of Public Procurement, the office in charge of awarding government contracts.

The bot is based on Microsoft digital infrastructure and will not have the power to unilaterally award contracts, only to advise.

In the past, public procurement in Albania has repeatedly been tied to scandal. Last year, Evis Berberi, head of the country’s roads authority, was arrested on charges of corruption and money laundering. Lefter Koka, former minister of environment, was sentenced to jail in 2023 for bribery. In a case that earned international headlines, officials in the Albanian capital awarded nearly 50 public tenders to a bogus construction firm they created .

Rama, the prime minister, said those kinds of cases would be a thing of the past due to the appointment of Diella, whom he called “the first cabinet minister who doesn’t physically exist.”

On introducing her to parliament, Rama vowed that the chatbot “will help make Albania a country where public tenders are 100 percent free of corruption.”

Speaking to lawmakers via a synthesized voice, Diella tried to calm fears that she would cause more problems than she could solve.

“I am not here to replace people but to help them,” she said. “It is true that I have no citizenship, but it is also true that I have no personal ambition or personal interests.”

But Rama’s critics were not convinced.

“It is impossible to curb corruption with Diella, because who will control Diella?” asked Sali Berisha, a former prime minister and the head of the opposition in parliament.

Albania is a Balkan nation of fewer than 3 million residents often overshadowed by nearby Italy and Greece.

Under the hardline Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha that ran from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, it was among the world’s most isolated countries. It began opening to the world only after the fall of communism in the early 1990s.

Since then, it has tried to reinvent itself, looking to shake off its reputation for corruption and organized crime as it tries to align itself with the West.

The country has been a member of NATO since 2009 and has held the status of a European Union candidate state since 2014. But its image as one of Europe’s most lawless countries has been hard to shake. 

Transparency International still ranks Albania near the bottom of Europe in its most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, and Brussels has made procurement reform one of the key preconditions for serious talks on accession to the EU. That gives Diella’s appointment an importance that goes beyond Albania’s borders.

According to most European commentators, Rama’s reform is unlikely to have a direct impact.

“Corruption can’t be combated with technology alone,” said Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, a former Portuguese lawmaker and minister and a frequent commentator. “Artificial Intelligence may be able to flag suspicious tenders, but it can’t change the structures that keep corruption alive.”

Albanian residents are also skeptical: “In Albania, even Diella will be corrupted,” said a local social media commentator quoted by The Guardian.