Chapter 2: Shaping a National Vision

In 2017, Azimi founded the TajRupt as an educational not-for-profit based on his own U.S. educational experiences. Two years later, hundreds of Tajik middle and high school students had completed programs in economics, gender empowerment, arts, and philosophy. When some students expressed interest in more math and computer science curriculum, Azimi secured a grant from the Islamic Development Bank to launch TajRupt.ai, or the AI Academy, offering specialized training in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Within a year, students and instructors produced impressive results, from high completion rates to novel machine learning applications. Seeing this, Azimi, who had been admitted to graduate school, returned to the United States with the intention of learning how to scale TajRupt across Tajikistan.

Then, shortly after starting his MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, AI Academy faculty and students showed Azimi the advanced machine-learning credit-scoring application they had developed. Azimi immediately recognized the tools’ market potential. He named it “zypl.ai” and enrolled in Stanford GSB’s renowned Startup Garage to develop it into a business. Zypl.ai quickly attracted customers, forcing Azimi to skip class in order to raise venture funding, traveling between Palo Alto, Dushanbe, Dubai, and other global hubs. During these travels, he began to wonder: could applications like zypl.ai, which emerged organically from the AI Academy, be the missing link to accelerating Tajikistan’s growth? 

For his master’s thesis at Harvard Kennedy School, Azimi drew on TajRupt and zypl.ai to develop a national framework for economic growth in Tajikistan. He hypothesized that investment in mass education and an AI-focused startup ecosystem would fuel rapid economic growth in Tajikistan. 

In it, Azimi observed the slowing growth of the “BRICS” nations and argued that following the traditional industrialization development path would similarly leave Tajikistan in this "middle-income trap" (BRICS is an intergovernmental organization comprising ten countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates). Instead, he proposed that Tajikistan capitalize on its key assets—a young, educated population and widespread internet access—to transform into a knowledge-based economy.

By training a significant portion of its workforce in artificial intelligence, the most economically promising technology at the time, Tajikistan could essentially leapfrog the traditional economic growth model and build a workforce of highly technical, high-income human capital. Azimi’s thesis made the case that investing in national development around artificial intelligence could allow Tajikistan to craft a new vision for itself. 

Leveraging his connections within the Tajik government, Azimi presented his proposal to Sherali Kabir, Tajikistan’s newly appointed Minister of Industry and New Technologies, in late 2020. 

Azimi’s thesis resonated with Minister Kabir, whose team had been advancing industrialization initiatives under a prior executive mandate for economic development. With Minister Kabir’s backing, Azimi’s Master’s thesis evolved into Tajikistan’s official artificial intelligence strategy, ratified by the national government. The ambitious plan set milestones to integrate AI into the economy: AI-driven innovations were to contribute 1% of GDP by 2026, 5% by 2040, and boost annual GDP growth by 1.5 to 2 percentage points at its peak. In financial terms, the strategy aimed to generate over $120 million in AI-driven economic activity within three years and $1.5 billion in fifteen, essentially creating a billion-dollar industry from scratch.