Dear readers,

This week, we explore how Albania’s bold experiment in AI-powered governance spectacularly unraveled. Last September, prime minister Edi Rama unveiled Diella, the world’s first AI minister, promising to clean up public procurement and bring transparency to a historically corrupted system. But beneath the PR stunt, the project exposed the limits of digital trust: internal corruption, legal disputes over the avatar’s likeness, and a stark reminder that no algorithm can replace accountable institutions.

Across the Balkans, the tech ecosystem continues to evolve: Croatia’s Farseer raises $7.2 million to automate financial planning, Serbia’s Cloud City joins NVIDIA Inception to advance smart-city solutions, and Bulgarian drone company Dronamics launches its first defense platform. Meanwhile, Startup Macedonia’s founder Igor Madzov challenges the region to move from activation to mature ecosystems, emphasizing structure, liquidity, and repeatable exits over photo sessions.

Finally, mark your calendars: the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin (July 8–10) promises insights from NVIDIA, GitHub, Amazon, Atlassian, and OpenAI on the AI-driven future of software development, with COO Naida Vikalo emphasizing the power of collaboration alongside technical skill.

Enjoy the new edition, 
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs

Last September Albanian prime minister Edi Rama stood before cameras in Tirana and unveiled Diella, the world’s first AI minister. For a moment, it felt like Albania had finally hacked the future. A soft-voiced avatar in a traditional ethno-style outfit promised to cleanse public procurement, expose corruption, and do what generations of Balkan reformers had failed to achieve: make power behave and listen to its people.

For a country long trapped and continuously stumbling on its path towards the EU, the symbolism was irresistible. Albania would not just digitize: it would algorithmically purify itself, Rama said. 

Diella, whose name means sun in Albanian, was not your ordinary chatbot. She was announced as a cabinet-level minister for Artificial Intelligence, tasked with overseeing public tenders and ensuring that every cent of taxpayer money is accountable. In a region where public procurement has historically been a black hole of patronage, this was a revolutionary step. However, it was also, as it would soon turn out, performance art.

Behind the screen, Diella had started quietly inside e-Albania, the government’s digital portal, built by the National Agency for Information Society, AKSHI, in collaboration with Microsoft using OpenAI models hosted on Azure.

Citizens would use her to navigate forms, request documents, and avoid the petty extortion that had become routine in Albanian bureaucracy. For many Albanians, this felt less like digital transformation and more like the simple joy of not having to slip someone cash to get a stamp or the “missing” document in their file.

When tech meets Albanian institutions

When Rama elevated Diella from a civil-service tool to a cabinet-level figure, she aslo became something else entirely. The new minister was now a symbol of a state that wanted to skip straight from post-communist dysfunction to AI-powered modernity, preferably without thinking about much needed institutional reforms.

Albania’s constitution, of course, had never imagined a non-human minister. Was Diella issuing binding decisions, or was she merely advisory? Could a machine be held accountable if a tender went sideways? None of this was actually clarified, as opposition politicians mocked the move. However, the spectacle and the PR stung mattered more than the structure. Albania was selling itself as Europe’s most innovative reformer. A tiny Balkan country would leapfrog bureaucracy with code, even if it forgot to bring the law along for the ride.

The illusion collapsed when prosecutors placed AKSHI’s two top leaders under house arrest, accused of links to a criminal organization that manipulated public contracts. The same agency that ran Diella also controlled the entire digital backbone of the Albanian state.

Meanwhile, international media, including The New York Times, captured the irony: Albania’s corruption-fighting AI might itself be operating inside a corrupted infrastructure. As Rama outlined, the robot had no relatives - but apparently the people who owned its servers did.

Faceless minister exposes the limits of digital trust

An AI can only detect irregularities in the data it receives, and if tenders are manipulated, Diella will just confirm these lies with mathematical confidence. The government never explained how Diella was protected from internal interference - or whether she had any protection from it at all. 

Then came the second collapse - Diella’s face and voice belonged to an actor, Anila Bisha, hired under a limited contract to record material for the e-Albania chatbot. When that agreement expired, the government kept using her likeness, now as the face of a cabinet minister. So Bisha sued and her lawsuit accused the prime minister’s office and AKSHI of illegally continuing to use her identity and demanded that the state stop using her face.

Government spokespeople dismissed the case, blasting it as nonsense. But legally and politically, Diella was unraveling. She was now a compromised algorithm with a disputed face, run by an agency under criminal investigation. If this was the future of governance, it looked suspiciously like the dark past the country is still recovering from.

Diella was meant to show Europe that Albania was ready for the future. Instead, she showed how fragile digital governance becomes when it is built on unreformed institutions. In this sense, technology did not eliminate corruption, and it merely gave it a user interface. Through Diella, Albania tried to automate trust out of the Albanian people instead of building it.

In the end, the sun that was supposed to shine on Albanian governance faded into the same old Balkan twilight, where even the most advanced machines simply cannot escape the gravity of corrupted systems, no matter how much they are (or aren’t) willing to try. 

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The WeAreDevelopers World Congress annually brings together nearly 15,000 developers from across Europe and beyond, in what many consider the continent’s largest developer event. Over three days, on a main stage and eleven additional ones, speakers from tech giants such as NVIDIA, GitHub, Amazon, Atlassian and OpenAI share insights into how AI, cloud infrastructure and developer platforms are reshaping the way software is built, deployed and scaled across the global tech industry.