At a recent AI WEEK, the Israel National Digital Agency team and I took a different approach. My closest partner in building GOVAI, Elodie Zerbib, was with me, and on a suggestion from Maya Mareida, we replaced the standard booth of slides and demos with a simple sofa. We opened our laptops and invited people to sit, talk, and imagine the future of AI in government with us.
Throughout the day, we had fantastic conversations with people from academia, venture capital, and the wider tech ecosystem. A powerful and recurring idea emerged: "GOVAI Research." This would be a platform where students or startups could request secure access to government data, allowing them to build and validate their work directly within the GOVAI environment.
The benefits are mutual. Researchers gain real-world validation by creating measurable change in the public sector. Startups get strong business validation by working with a government design partner—a factor that VCs at the event told us would significantly accelerate the path to investment for Israeli startups.
For me, this is not a distant dream. The technology exists, the model is sound, and we have the right people to make it happen. Team members like Lea Cohen Hameiri, who knows how to connect with government offices, and Nir Yanovsky Dagan, who has excellent connections in academia, are already building these critical bridges. With the right ecosystem around us, it feels like this train is impossible to stop.