'Vietnam strives to have at least 10 million people with basic AI skills by 2030'

These are the contents of the draft National AI Transformation Strategy - determining goals to 2030 and vision to 2045, shared by Dr. Tran Anh Tu, Deputy Director of Digital Technology and Artificial Intelligence, Ministry of Science and Technology, at the National Scientific Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Cryptography and Information Security (AI4CRIS 2026) on August 14.

According to Mr. Tu, the first key viewpoint of the Strategy that Vietnam is building is "comprehensive transformation with AI". Instead of bringing AI into each individual product, service or process, this technology is oriented to become a core competency from problem identification, system design to operation.

In the public sector, the draft sets a goal that by 2030, all online public services and administrative procedure records will be supported by AI. All ministries, branches and localities issue AI transformation plans. 60% of state agencies' directing and operating decisions are supported by data and artificial intelligence.

In the private sector, AI technology will support at least 500,000 small and medium enterprises, business households, and cooperatives. Vietnam has at least 100 AI startups with over 10 million USD.

The draft proposes to build a national computing capacity coordination platform, a Vietnamese model evaluation platform, at least 5 shared AI platforms and 8 Vietnamese models.

According to Dr. Tu, the Strategy sets a common goal, artificial intelligence will contribute about 6% of GDP and Vietnam is in the top 3 in Southeast Asia in AI research and development. Vision to 2045 Vietnam belongs to the group of 10 leading countries in Asia in AI capacity, with artificial intelligence becoming the main operating platform of the State, economy and society.

Data problem

According to Lieutenant Colonel Dao Dinh Nam, Deputy Head of the General Staff Department, representative of the National Data Center, the AI ​​Strategy must be linked to domestic data.

"AI only creates sustainable value that is developed on a foundation of correct, sufficient, clean, live, unified and shared data that can be traced back to its origin," Mr. Nam said, adding that an AI model may have good processing capacity, but the results are inaccurate or ineffective if the training data lacks representation or is not updated.

Lieutenant Colonel Nam said that the risk is greater, false output can be presented in a reasonable way, making users trust and use it as a basis for decision-making. Therefore, AI quality depends on the entire data management chain, from collection, standardization, labeling, sharing to training, testing and monitoring during operation.

The Center identifies data groups that need to be prioritized for AI development including: serving the large Vietnamese language model; computer vision; testing and evaluation; essential fields and data for assessing safety and reliability. The last group includes data on identifying fake news, misinformation, detecting AI-generated multimedia products, attack scenarios and testing AI, as well as data on malware and cybersecurity threats.

According to experts, data serving AI is not only to "teach" the model, but also must be enough to test, test attack and evaluate the level of safety before putting the system into use.

Another requirement is to move from investing in individual computing capacity to a shared HPC and AI infrastructure with a coordination mechanism. The National Data Center believes that if ministries, branches and localities invest separately, resources may be scattered and it will be difficult to create enough capacity for problems on a national scale. Shared computing infrastructure can serve big data processing, AI model training, simulation, prediction and system safety assessment.

Sharing also helps unify architecture, technical standards and how to control input data. This is similar to the goal in the draft National AI Transformation Strategy of forming a national AI computing capacity coordination platform.

From the above requirements, the National Data Center recommends 4 transformations: from distributed data to a connected national data ecosystem; from individual computing infrastructure investments to shared HPC and AI capabilities; from passive protection to risk management and incorporating data security right from the design stage; from technology dependence to gradually mastering data, AI models, computing infrastructure and cryptography technology.

Speaking at the event, Lieutenant General Vu Ngoc Thiem, Head of the Government Cipher Committee, assessed that artificial intelligence is becoming the foundation technology of the digital era, posing the need to create a technology development strategy, perfect institutions and foster talent.

AI4CRIS is a national scientific conference organized by the Academy of Cryptographic Engineering under the Government Cipher Committee. Lieutenant General Vu Ngoc Thiem said that with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, no agency, organization or business can fully solve the new requirements on their own. Therefore, AI4CRIS aims to become an annual forum, promoting cooperation, sharing knowledge and forming a research and innovation ecosystem in the fields of AI, cryptography and information security.

Nam Nguyen