Data is the new driving force that promotes economic transformation and development, and a new way to improve management capacity.

The governments around the world have realized that public data is a valuable resource which needs to be exploited effectively.

Opening and sharing data among parties will help foster innovation and creation, socio-economic development as well as strengthen cooperation between the government and businesses and people.

According to Dung, Vietnam is a country with strong digital development.

Vietnam has a great advantage in the domestic market scale with 98.5 million people, 85 percent of whom have smartphones and 79 percent have an internet connection. Vietnam has a young population structure, mostly ages 25-44 and 5-12, a generation of digital citizens with a robust data market in the future.

Instead of going fast, Vietnam has chosen to go smart with open data and AI, so that institutions, enterprises and individuals can join forces to create new values.

The process of ‘going smart’ with the strength of data and AI will find timely, new and comprehensive solutions to create a competitive edge for the country.

“With this orientation, Vietnam will become a technological country, based on and inheriting the human’s knowledge and contributing knowledge to humans,” Dung said.

On June 8, the Ministry of Information and Communications, together with the Thua Thien-Hue People’s Committee and the World Bank, organized an international conference discussing the use of open data and AI as a driving force for economic growth.

At the conference, speakers talked about the impacts of open data on economic growth; international trends and experiences in implementing, evaluating and measuring open data; discussed open data policies, opportunities and challenges in localities in Vietnam; exchanged understanding in optimizing the value of open data to promote research, investment for development and application of AI in Vietnam.

At present, Vietnam needs to continue to heighten awareness of the new value of data, improve the legal environment to contribute to accelerating the national digital transformation; build a list of data resources in different fields to promote interdisciplinary data integration, development and use; and create an open data ecosystem.

Trong Dat