In an open session at the IBBC Mansion House conference, leading digital practitioners and companies operating in Iraq, discuss where and how Iraq is on the journey towards digital transformation.

The panel took place online and in person at the Mansion House, and included Mr Padraig O’Hannelly, Iraq Business News, who gave us an overview of where payments and AI are in Iraq, and some of the issues people are facing, including corruption as an endemic legacy.

MD Iraq, SAP Mr Saquib Ahmed, took the view that the most important part of the transformation in to bring the people in an organisation along with any technical changes, including training and education and re-education or, learning to unlearn old habits and systems. The main idea being that Technology now enables companies and Governments to do things differently, not to do the same things digitally. It offers a fundamental rethink and planning of opportunities for efficiency, delivery, jobs and modelling outcomes, rather than replicating the same things on line. SAP are working in several sectors in Iraq, including Finance and Education. Ms Cynthia El Khoury, Country manager Iraq, for Mastercard, also reiterated the point about culture and education, and explained Mastercard are enabling vendors and financial organisation to transact in new ways – and the training and support that enables that to happen, even though the process can be slow, it is inevitable. Mastercard are also working with the GOI to deliver payments for salaries and transactions. Mr Ali Al-Khairalla, first secretary at the Embassy of Republic of Iraq, explained what his work involved in the MOFA, to enable validation documents, identity E citizenship Digitalisation and E- Governance  and he is now charged with looking at E citizenship in the Ministry of Interior the effect of this new online service is to make acquisition and decision on documents almost immediate. Key to this is how people adopt the new technologies and his role has been to trial limited locations, see what the issues are and then scale it out once resolved, over the last few months. Mr Peter Chamberlin, consultant at Scott Logic. Gave an intriguing view of AI and the need to regulate, provide guidelines and ethical parameters to companies and governments alike. As with the others, its less about the technology per se, but the human interaction and management of it that will be important. AI per se, is currently an efficient aggregator of global knowledge, that can speed up productivity and take the heavy lifting from most laborious jobs, while helping create new forms of work. The panel was chaired by Ashley Goodall of IBBC.

The Tech Forum recording is here