Speakers at a roundtable yesterday urged experts to move beyond digitalisation and build a national ecosystem centred on people, skills, and innovation to enhance and foster artificial intelligence (AI) capability.
Building AI capability is a must to reshape the economy, labour markets and global competitiveness, they said.
Grameenphone and The Daily Star jointly organised the roundtable titled “Future-Ready Bangladesh: AI, Skills & Youth Employability in the Digital Economy”, at The Daily Star Centre.
Bangladesh’s success in the AI era would depend less on adopting technology and more on developing human capability, strengthening institutions and introducing coordinated national policies, the speakers said.
Delivering the keynote address, Zulkarin Jahangir, research affiliate at MIT and assistant professor at North South University, said AI has already become mainstream globally, with 78 percent of organisations using AI and nearly half automating complete workstreams through AI agents.
“The question is not whether Bangladesh will adopt AI, but whether Bangladesh can build capability faster than others,” he said.
He cautioned that digital readiness alone would not make the country competitive in the AI era.
“Bangladesh now needs to transform digital access into AI capability,” he said.
Drawing on findings from Unesco’s AI Readiness Assessment, the Stanford AI Index and other global studies, Jahangir said the country’s greatest investment must now be its people.
He urged universities to redesign education and ensure that students develop critical thinking, reasoning, creativity and ethical judgement alongside introducing AI governance frameworks, disclosure requirements for AI-assisted academic work, faculty training and discipline-specific AI literacy.
“AI should accelerate learning -- it should never replace learning,” he said.
The government is preparing a national AI policy to improve public service delivery and governance through integrating AI into government programmes. We want to ensure transparency and accountability, and AI can help us achieve both.
Mahdi Amin, adviser to the prime minister
He also called on Bangladesh to build its own AI ecosystem instead of remaining a consumer of imported technologies by investing in Bangla datasets, AI-enabled freelancing, model evaluation, data annotation and applied AI research.
Jahangir further proposed a National AI Skills Compact, bringing together government, universities, industry and development partners.
Mahdi Amin, adviser to the prime minister for ministries of education and labour and employment, said the government is preparing a national AI policy to improve public service delivery and governance through integrating AI into government programmes ranging from social safety nets and policymaking to project monitoring and public service delivery.
He added that AI could significantly strengthen monitoring and supervision of public projects while reducing bureaucratic delays.
“The government wants to ensure transparency and accountability, and AI can help us achieve both,” he added.
Amin also stressed that the government sees itself as a policy facilitator, with the private sector leading economic growth through stronger public-private partnerships.
He announced plans to gradually make technical and vocational education compulsory from sixth-grade, establish TVET laboratories across schools, and strengthen university-industry collaboration to bridge the country’s skills gap.
Prof Dr Mamun Ahmed, chairman of University Grants Commission, said Bangladesh’s higher education sector is facing a strange paradox where the number of university graduates and graduate unemployment both remain high due to the absence of a linkage between academia and industry.
He said the UGC is working on creating a digital platform connecting students, universities, industry, faculty members and the Bangladeshi diaspora to improve collaboration and employability.
ASM Amanullah, vice-chancellor of National University, said the country’s university system needs a major transformation to prepare nearly four million students for the AI era with a competent curriculum.
Skill-based education and a complete paradigm shift in curriculum are essential to prepare graduates for future jobs, he added.
Grameenphone Chief Financial Officer Otto Magne Risbakk described today’s youth as digital natives capable of transforming organisations, but warned that rapid AI innovation must be matched by long-term investments in digital infrastructure.
Farhana Islam, head of Environment, Social and Governance at Grameenphone, said Bangladesh faces a widening skills gap as 2.2 million young people enter the job market annually while graduate unemployment remains at 28 percent.
She noted that Bangladesh ranks 75th among 195 countries on the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index, and that nearly 90 percent of young people currently use AI mainly for social media and entertainment rather than career development, while two-thirds of global employers now prefer candidates with AI skills.
She highlighted Grameenphone Academy’s role in addressing the gap through reaching more than 3,24,000 youths and awarding over 1,31,000 certifications.
Mahfuz Anam, editor and publisher of The Daily Star, said skills have become the defining factor between dependency and productivity in the AI era.
“We are beggars if we are not skillful, and if we are skillful, then we produce for the country,” he said.
He warned that AI could eliminate a large number of routine jobs and widen inequality unless countries invest aggressively in upskilling youths.
Shahir Chowdhury, chief executive officer of Shikho, said, “While technical AI skills like machine learning and data science remain important, the bigger opportunity is enabling millions of people to use AI effectively. Our education system must therefore prepare people not just for today’s jobs but for tomorrow’s opportunities.”
Maruf Azam, project manager at UNDP Bangladesh; Munir Hasan, president of the Bangladesh Open Source Network; and Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj, country representative of The Asia Foundation, as well as youth representatives Md Aman Ullah Aman and Maria Nawar, also spoke.
Tanjim Ferdous, head of Strategic Partnerships at The Daily Star, moderated the event.
