Cape Town, South Africa// – The Digital Cooperation Organisation (DCO) launched the AI-REAL Toolkit at the G20 Digital Economy and Artificial Intelligence Ministers’ Meeting, marking a major milestone in advancing responsible artificial intelligence.
The toolkit provides countries with a clear roadmap from readiness to adoption, ensuring that AI development is ethical, inclusive, and sustainable by transforming ambition into concrete, actionable steps that make adoption fair, inclusive, and impactful for all.
The Toolkit was also highlighted and presented this week at the Pak–Kuwait Tech Conference 2025 in Kuwait, where it was showcased as a pioneering initiative of the DCO to support Member States in advancing responsible AI adoption.
The AI-REAL (AI Readiness to Empowerment, Adoption, and Leadership) Toolkit is one of the first multilateral frameworks of its kind. It is designed to help countries translate AI pillars, dimensions, and KPIs into practice, equipping policymakers, regulators, and other stakeholders with practical tools to assess readiness, identify gaps, and shape national strategies. The toolkit ensures that AI is deployed responsibly, ethically, inclusively, and sustainably.
DCO Secretary-General, Deemah AlYahya, stated: “It has become essential to treat digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence as global public goods, built on inclusion and fairness. The digital and AI divides are not just numbers and statistics; they represent lost opportunities for millions of people.
Our message is clear: we must move from ambition to execution, and from promises to practical solutions. The launch of the AI-REAL Toolkit reflects the Organisation’s commitment to transforming aspirations into actionable pathways, ensuring that every nation and every individual has a place in the future of the global digital economy.”
The DCO AI-REAL Toolkit offers a qualitative, diagnostic assessment across 5 strategic pillars, 17 dimensions and 39 Key Performance Indicators, including Strategy, Policies & Regulations, and Research & Development, as well as Data & Infrastructure, Investment and Talent and Skills. These pillars, dimensions, and KPIs are informed by benchmarking leading and emerging AI countries to extract global best practices.
The Toolkit was piloted in selected DCO Member States to validate its practical applicability, strategic relevance, and effectiveness in guiding national AI readiness and policy development, while also refining and finalizing its frameworks for broader implementation.
While there are already global indexes that rank countries on their AI readiness, the AI-REAL Toolkit is different. It doesn’t stop at measuring where a nation stands, it helps them move forward. As one of the first multilateral self-assessment tools of its kind, it provides governments with a clear path and roadmap from AI readiness to adoption, ensuring that AI is developed in ways that are ethical, inclusive, sustainable and beneficial for people.
The announcement indeed underscores the DCO’s strategic objectives, equipping its 16 Member States with the resources to navigate AI responsibly. According to Goldman Sachs, generative AI could lift global GDP by roughly 7% over the next decade, with productivity gains of about 1.5 percentage points, making AI one of the most consequential drivers of economic growth in this generation. Meanwhile, Statista forecasts that the AI market will grow from US$ 244 billion in 2025 to over US$ 1 trillion by 2031, underlining both the scale of opportunity and the urgency of responsible adoption.
The AI Ethics Evaluator – launched by the Digital Cooperation Organization in July 2025 during the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, and presented to Member States as the first-of-its-kind benchmark for ethical AI governance was a key milestone in progressing responsible and ethical AI adoption.
While the AI-REAL toolkit represents a more comprehensive step forward, providing an integrated framework to help nations overcome adoption barriers across the pillars of readiness, empowerment, and leadership.
