The government aims to develop at least 3,000 artificial intelligence professionals by 2032, Deputy Minister of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy Nicodemos Damianou said on Tuesday.
Speaking on a panel on AI and inequality at the 22nd Annual Economist Cyprus Summit in Nicosia, Damianou said Cyprus’s aim was not simply to win the global AI race but to promote its use where it could add the most value.
He presented three initiatives to build skills and widen access to the technology, which he said formed part of a ‘Social Contract for AI’ intended to ensure it empowers people rather than quietly replacing them. An AI Literacy Framework will bring AI and critical thinking into schools, with teachers keeping control of the teaching process. A National AI Skills Observatory will link training to labour market needs, and the FutureAI CY initiative will offer retraining programmes for workers and small businesses.
Damianou stressed the need to make AI’s benefits more widely accessible, warning that the digital divide was turning into a gap in access to knowledge and to the technology’s potential. “The bottleneck is not the machine. It is our organisations,” he said, adding that productivity gains depended on how businesses and organisations adapted the way they work to make use of AI.
He also called for greater access to open AI models and shared computing infrastructure, so that the benefits are not confined to a few large providers. He said AI would drive growth, and that whether it widened inequalities was a matter of choice, with time still to act.
AI use lags in Cyprus and Greece
Business use of AI in Cyprus and Greece was close to 9 per cent, against around 42 per cent in Denmark, Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos, secretary general for information systems and digital governance at Greece’s Ministry of Digital Governance, told the panel.
In 2025, around 50 to 55 per cent of large European businesses used AI tools, compared with just 17 per cent of small businesses, he said.
Anagnostopoulos warned of a risk of new inequalities over access to AI and, above all, between those who can use it effectively and those who cannot. He said AI offered significant productivity gains but also risked concentrating economic power in a few hands, and that governments should act as facilitators of AI in both the public and private sectors, not only as regulators.
As an example of Greek efforts to widen access, he said 60,000 licences for digital tools had been issued to civil servants and 30,000 workers had been trained, while free training programmes had also been offered to citizens.
He said Greece’s ‘Daedalus’ supercomputer, ranked 31st in the world, was expected to start offering AI services, training and the capacity to run models from December. He also referred to the ‘Pharos’ ecosystem, which will develop models and promote their use, saying such infrastructure mattered not only for Greece but also for European goals.
(Information from Cyprus News Agency)
