The AI Academy in Tajikistan blossomed out of local education nonprofit’s mission to provide extracurricular opportunities to the country’s youth and dramatically transform their future potential. As students participated in the program and created machine learning solutions with legitimate commercial viability, the AI Academy’s founder Azizjon Azimi raised over a million dollars for one of these solutions from investors across the world, making this new company Tajikistan’s first potential unicorn. Seeing this growth opportunity, Azimi, with the help of a few government leaders in Tajikistan, authored the first nationally adopted “AI Strategy” in the Central Asian region, while also making Tajikistan the first low-income country in the world to do so. With a popular education nonprofit, a rapidly growing machine learning startup, and now a government office, Azimi and his team must decide the appropriate allocation of their limited resources and set a scaling strategy to achieve their ultimate goal of creating a prosperous economic future for Tajikistan’s youth.
