Federal and Moscow City authorities have brought Russia’s largest savings bank, Sberbank, onboard for discussions of the prospects of an experimental five-year program which might be developed in Moscow to maximize Russia’s potential in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the Russian business daily Kommersant reported.

If finalized, the program may give participants a very special (eased) regulatory regime and access to what the authors of the initiative say will be an “impersonalized” dataset for a range of promising projects in the field. Such may be projects in smart transport, speech recognition for municipal call centers, medical diagnostics, face recognition for security purposes, predictive service providing, or processing of claims.

If the idea of an experimental program is not scrapped as discussions continue, even high-risk AI-based solutions that will have been proven to be economically viable might get a chance for implementation. What has yet to be resolved, though, is the problem of legalizing access to data.

According to official Russian government information, Russia accounts for 10.8% of all global AI-driven products. In 2018, Russia’s AI market topped $3bn; forecasters believe that by 2024 it may swell to a much more noticeable $14bn.