Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni has spent her career building artificial intelligence. Now she regulates it.
Morocco appointed her Minister of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform in October 2024. With a Ph.D. in computer science, 200-plus research papers, and a track record of running Africa’s first UNESCO center for AI, her job now is to make the technology work for the people it has ignored.
Under her watch, Morocco has put 660 government services on a single national portal and is rolling out chatbots so citizens who aren’t comfortable with screens can still access them. The country has partnered with France’s Mistral AI to build language models that understand Arabic and also Darija and Amazigh, Morocco’s widely spoken but digitally neglected languages.
Seghrouchni wants Morocco, along with Africa and the Arab world, to offer what she calls a “third voice” on AI, separate from the U.S., European, and Chinese approaches. Her argument is blunt: Eighty languages across Africa have been ignored by the big tech companies. If nobody else is going to build AI that speaks to them, Morocco will.
Seghrouchni spoke with Rest of World at the Web Summit Qatar 2026 in Doha. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
