Azerbaijan's digital ministry signs an AI memorandum with Wonderful

Azerbaijan's Ministry of Digital Development and Transport has signed a memorandum of understanding with Wonderful, a company that sells an AI platform to large organisations, to explore deploying AI across ministries, agencies and state-owned companies, the ministry said on 29 October.

The memorandum is a framework rather than a contract. The parties will identify use cases together and consider wider deployment of those that work, and they envisage a shared AI platform for citizens, businesses and government institutions, with one set of controls, planned for deployment on the state's Government Cloud (G-Cloud). The ministry published no value, timetable or price.

The signing ceremony in Baku was attended by Rashad Hasanov, the deputy minister, Farid Osmanov, chairman of the board of the Innovation and Digital Development Agency, and a Wonderful delegation led by its co-founder and chief executive, Bar Winkler. Hasanov said the cooperation is aligned with the Action Plan for 2026 to 2028 on Accelerating Digital Development, and the ministry also ties the memorandum to the Artificial Intelligence Strategy for 2025 to 2028. At a roundtable after the signing, Wonderful showed tools for residence application checks, import document verification, an anonymous assistant for families in Azerbaijani, voice support for the myGov portal and help for public transport passengers.

The ministry said Wonderful intends to set up a local entity in Baku, hire local staff and train Azerbaijani specialists, and has hired its first employee in the country. The ministry's page describes Wonderful as founded in 2025 and working in more than 35 markets. The minister, Rashad Nabiyev, had met Winkler a day earlier to discuss AI in the public sector and an office in Azerbaijan.

It is the second AI memorandum covering the whole of government in a month: the ministry signed one with SpaceXAI to test its Grok models in public services, set out in our report on the draft AI rules. G-Cloud, the platform named in the Wonderful memorandum, is still taking in government systems; a deputy minister said in September that the migration is due to finish by the end of 2027, as our data centre explainer records. Neither memorandum has a published value or a date for a first pilot.