Data Before AI. People Before Tools.

On 9 October I stood at the podium in the Saeima Baltiešu Zāle. The room was full of ministers, ministry and municipality officials, bankers and economists. The topic was the state budget. I came to talk about data. The conference was "Smart Growth: A Sustainable State Budget in the Digital Age". My talk: "From Data to Smarter Decisions".

A runner's lesson

I spent years on the track as a middle-distance runner. There, the gap between winning and losing is a fraction of a second. What decides it is knowing your numbers — and trusting them. Business and politics are no different. The line is narrow. Trusted data tips it.

Everyone wants AI. Few are ready for it.

AI came up in almost every conversation that day. My message was less exciting, and more urgent: AI doesn't fix a data problem. It exposes it.

Data maturity has six dimensions – uses, data, leadership, skills, tools and culture. Tools are just one. I focused on three that decide whether the rest pays back:

• Leadership. Data has value only when goals and KPIs are clear. Otherwise, you get the Netflix scroll problem: endless dashboards, no decision.

• Data. The public sector has plenty. What it lacks is data that is trusted, accessible and shared across institutions.

• Skills. Training alone doesn't change behavior. Practice, peer review and real feedback do.

The Malta story

Then I shared a learning from our work with Malta government. Malta rolled out AI tools licenses across the whole government. Couple of months later, AI usage was under 5%. Not because the tools failed. Because the data (inputs) wasn't ready – and neither were the people.

So, the government stepped back and started with people by assessing everyone's data skills, training leaders and specialists side by side, and, eventually, measure real behavior change.

Latvia doesn't have to learn this lesson the expensive way.

Data before AI. People before tools.

That's the line I closed with. A smarter budget doesn't start with buying AI tools. It starts with clear goals, trusted data and people who can use it.

The full talk – the maturity framework, the skills model, the Malta details — is in the conference recording (from 2:50:00). Slides are on the Saeima website.