“The next step in our digital strategy is to integrate AI into every aspect of the economy and the state,” Minister of National Economy and Finance Kyriakos Pierrakakis stressed at the conference on “Cyber Greece 2025: The Future powered by AI,” which is taking place today under the auspices of the Ministry of Digital Governance and the National Cyber Security Authority.

Here is the full speech of Kyriakos Pierrakakis:

“Thank you very much, Ladies and Gentlemen. I think it is a very important thing to be able to reflect on the really important issues that concern us. You said it, Mr. Hajinikolaou, every self-respecting conference has AI on it. However, I think that too often we in the political system are also overwhelmed by the low intelligence of parapolitics. So, in that sense, it’s much more productive, much more meaningful, to get down to the really big stuff. And this is certainly one of them.

It’s commonplace that technology and technological change – we learn this in economics – is the catalyst for economic progress. A very, very great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, called this “creative destruction”. You have those forces that come along and continually, through the movement of innovation, change the way economic systems work.

This logic is reflected, for example, by the change and transition from the carriage to the automobile. These cycles of technological change have always changed economies and have been described by economists of every hue, from liberal economists to Marx.

The differentiation that is now being made by Artificial Intelligence has to do with speed. Technology always changes with what we call in mathematics an “exponential curve”. The human mind thinks linearly. And I would say, as a self-critique, of the political systems of the world, that they are sublinear in how they metabolize these changes.

And the differentiation that we’re about to experience in what we call the Fourth Industrial Revolution – because, if schematically the first is steam, the second is electricity and the third is computing – the fourth is a convergence of the digital, physical and biological spheres, with AI being its dominant technology.

The differentiation that we have now is that whereas in classic technological shifts of previous decades a technological shift – say, of my generation when I was in university – was from Athens, which was full of video clubs, to today, where we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and we download entertainment content through streaming, that shift took about 10-15 years.

The technological changes that are happening now are in months, not to mention weeks. This exponential curve is too hard to be altered by our institutions and by entrepreneurship, but even harder by the software of democracy itself.

Artificial Intelligence, however, will change everything. And it is very, very important that we can be proactive about how we perceive, process and plan – I will say – for these changes. Because, at the end of the day, the future is either planned or suffered if you haven’t participated in planning it.

When we were launching the digital transformation exercise in 2019 under Kyriakos Mitsotakis – the exercise that Dimitris Papastergiou and his team at the Ministry of Digital Governance are continuing today – we were told… AI was starting to come in as a slogan then and in the conference titles, and I was giving a bit of a cynical answer when they were telling me about AI. I was saying that I was more interested in the plain “I”. That is, having systems that can be rudimentarily intelligent. You don’t have to have a state, a country, in which you take a piece of paper from the second floor, take it to the third floor of a service and put it back, because nobody knows – ultimately – where the paper itself should end up. And, therefore, you have a state that is not intelligent or, in any case, not even functional. Sometimes it’s callous.

That conception led to us being able to conquer and create a structure that today gives its aegis to this conference – the Department of Digital Government – which has the conception of having a CIO in government.

That is, to be able to interoperate all the registries, to be able to redesign all the agencies. Because it is objective to say that the state, basically, has not been designed, the state has emerged from the designs of hundreds of state officials and politicians legislating without an “architect” who organizes the way the state works. And so it has resulted, in our country, for example, unlike other countries, that we have 10 steps in one process, 15 steps in another process, and we end up with a very bureaucratic and heavy state. And all this was happening because the registries were not interoperable – because we could not, that is, have this information go digitally from the second to the third floor in the terms I described before.

The central infrastructure that we started building in 2019, what was it? To create large databases, data pools, which, ultimately, as we built them, as we built both the identification condition and the interoperability condition and the data storage condition, we were basically creating the conditions for the state and the country to be able to move into the next phase, which is the AI era. That is what Dimitris Papastergiou is now trying to do. What was the next step?

When we were creating the gov.gr, to extend it with AI structures on top, as it now has the digital assistant, and ultimately to be able to integrate machine learning into every aspect of the Greek state and the Greek public sector. It certainly needs to be integrated into the private sector as well. In Greece we have experienced the paradox: the state running faster than much of the private sector in digital in the past few years.

I think the big stakes now, precisely because times are faster, will be to be able to very quickly, with very good reflexes, to rethink how we should, ultimately, for the first time, design the state.

Because, if we look at it from an economic point of view, Greece has achieved several very important things in recent years. I was in the US last week. 10, 12, 15 years ago, Greece, for the International Monetary Fund, represented something different from what it represents today. We have been able to balance the country fiscally; the debt has been decelerating, investment has been increasing, and exports have been increasing. All this is taking place in the context of a great digital change, because tax evasion, which was the headline to a very large extent, has been reduced because of the introduction of digital means in the tax administration, by the tax administration. All of this is good. But, for us to be able to achieve real convergence, which is the North in our compass with the European Union, we need, basically, as we have now, where we have growth well above the European average (about double), to have this for several years and even faster, so that we can reach the European average. Why? Because we have had a lost decade in which the country has been on its knees. We lost 25 points in our GDP.

This is the equivalent of the Great Crash of ’29 in America, in terms of the next century. And, therefore, we need to be able to fix all those things that we have not yet been able to fix. Because we have a fiscal conquest, we have a digital conquest, but Greek productivity is still not where it should be. Even though investment is increasing every year, it is still not where it should be. We have the highest growth rate, but we are still below the European average. In 2019 it was 11% of GDP, the budget that we have now submitted to Parliament predicts that we will reach 18% of GDP in investment. The European average is 21%. So, we are on the right track, but there is still a lot to be done in our country.

I think that, given the challenges that we face, which are not only digital, demographics is an existential challenge for Greece – you have dealt with this a lot, Mr. Hadjinicolaou – climate change is an existential challenge for Greece. And how quickly the state, the Greek economy, our country more broadly, manages to integrate these technologies into its model, into its core, into the way it operates, will be absolutely crucial in terms of how, if and how quickly we will be able to
adapt and respond to these challenges.

I would tell you that this is absolutely possible, and part of the answer that I give, which is optimistic, has to do with what I experienced in the time of the pandemic, where — I see here fine public servants among us — this is the talent upon which we built, either from the state or from the private sector to enable Greece, which was a country with given challenges in 2019, to have, let’s say, the best vaccination system for COVID-19, certainly in Europe, one of the best in the world. Greek engineers did that.

That prompted, for example, an acquaintance of mine to call me from Geneva at that time and say: “I would like to make an appointment for the vaccine in Greece, because I am finding difficulties in Switzerland,” and I wondered whether I had imagined this or had just heard it on the phone.

I say this not because that is the big picture – in any of the cases, it is not yet; there is a lot to be done to get that big picture – but when you have islands that establish that this is possible, they make you believe in the achievability of the question. Can Greece even reach above the European average overall? And the answer is ‘yes’. As long as we believe in ourselves, have a well-founded strategy, don’t be afraid of the wave that is coming, and ride it.

That is exactly the gamble looking ahead. That’s the question: how we integrate machine learning technologies, AI as a whole, into every aspect of the economy and the state is the next step in our digital strategy. It’s not just a step we have to take, it’s a step we will take. Thank you very much.”

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