ASTANA — September 4, 2025.
Azerbaijan’s commercial banks are rolling out artificial-intelligence tools at pace, and the central bank is steering with a “guardrails, not hard bans” approach, Central Bank of Azerbaijan Director General Shahin Mahmudzade said to Report, on the sidelines of the Astana Finance Days forum.
Mahmudzade said the CBA has drafted a digital transformation roadmap and a SupTech program to supervise AI use, but stressed the rollout won’t be one-size-fits-all. “We have to decide which AI elements we’re ready to adopt now and which should wait. It’s not black and white—and every regulator must judge how deep to regulate and how much freedom to leave banks,” he noted.
Why it matters, in his view: global peers already using AI are lifting profitability, putting laggards at risk of losing market share. That’s why sweeping restrictions are unlikely—they would “quickly erode competitiveness versus regional players,” he said.
The regulator’s stance will vary by national development level, sector maturity, human capital, and institutional capacity, Mahmudzade added. On data governance, he called personal data “a traded commodity” with real generation and storage costs, warning that deeper AI integration raises privacy and security risks. Education levels shape readiness: “In low-literacy environments people often don’t realize what they’re giving up and why. There can’t be a single global standard—usage intensity should track a country’s development.”
