Artificial intelligence is changing public procurement faster than most institutions have had time to prepare for. The shift is not simply about software replacing manual steps. It is about rethinking how governments plan, source, evaluate, and manage contracts at a scale and speed that paper-based and early digital systems were never designed to support. Across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, development banks and international agencies have begun requiring AI readiness assessments as part of project evaluations. The organisations best positioned to navigate this shift are those that combine operational experience with a clear-eyed understanding of what AI can and cannot do in a procurement context.
Dohatec New Media sent four of its senior leadership to Turin, Italy, last month to do exactly that.
The workshop
The International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITCILO) ran its five-day residential course, “AI and Digital Transformation for Public Procurement,” from 18 to 22 May 2026 at its campus in Turin. ITCILO is the training arm of the ILO, with a mandate to build institutional capacity across member states. Its programmes are practitioner-facing by design, not academic in orientation. The centre has a specific track record in procurement capacity development, and this course reflects a deliberate decision to bring AI literacy into that domain at the operational level.
Developed by ITCILO, the course was designed to provide procurement professionals with practical knowledge and hands-on insights into the use of AI tools across specific procurement processes, from market analysis and bid evaluation to contract management, offering both a strategic and operational perspective on how AI can be responsibly applied in procurement operations.
The curriculum covered AI fundamentals, including machine learning, natural language processing, and generative AI; AI applications in strategic procurement planning, bidding processes, and contract management; AI governance and ethics; and a capstone project requiring participants to apply their learning to a concrete institutional context. Participants who completed all sessions received an official ITCILO Certificate of Participation in digital credentials format.
The course was not introductory. It was aimed at national and international public procurement practitioners, staff of national agencies, project directors of internationally funded projects, and personnel from the United Nations, European Union, and non-governmental organisations: professionals working at the operational level of procurement systems, not policy observers. The five-day residential format in Turin was itself a signal. This was not a webinar series. It was an immersive institutional commitment.
Who Dohatec sent, and why it matters
The four Dohatec representatives were CEO Chowdhury Farzad Ali; Director of Knowledge and Training Taslima Akter; Director of e-GP Nazmul Islam Bhuiyan; and Director of e-PMIS Md. Masudur Rahaman.
The composition of this group is deliberate. Dohatec builds and operates digital procurement infrastructure. The electronic Government Procurement (e-GP) system and the Electronic Project Management Information System (e-PMIS) are central to the company’s work in Bangladesh’s public sector. Nazmul Islam Bhuiyan and Md. Masudur Rahaman are the directors who run those product lines. Their presence at a course on AI in procurement is not professional development in the abstract; it is direct exposure to where their domain is heading.
Engineer Taslima Akter, also Vice President of Bangladesh Women in IT (BWIT), brings the knowledge and training mandate: understanding how these tools are taught and institutionalised, not just deployed. CEO Chowdhury Farzad Ali’s attendance signals that Dohatec treats this as a strategic question, not a departmental one. When a company’s chief executive sits in a classroom alongside its product directors, the message to the organisation is clear. This is not optional upskilling. It is core to where the company is going.
What does AI readiness mean in a procurement context?
The course framed AI adoption in procurement around a tension that experienced practitioners will recognise immediately: the technology introduces new levels of efficiency and transparency, but also raises critical questions around data quality, ethical use, accountability, and digital readiness. Those questions are not hypothetical in Bangladesh’s procurement environment. They are live operational concerns for anyone building or maintaining systems through which public money is committed.
Consider bid evaluation, one of the most consequential steps in any procurement cycle. An AI system trained on historical bid data can identify pricing anomalies, flag qualification gaps, and surface patterns that a manual review might miss over days of work. The same system, if the underlying data is inconsistent or the evaluation criteria are poorly structured, will systematise those inconsistencies at speed. The risk is not that AI does something dramatically wrong; it is that it does something subtly wrong, consistently and at scale, in ways that are harder to audit than manual error.
The module on AI governance and ethics, covering AI maturity assessment frameworks, the challenges of implementation, and creating AI-ready data, addressed the foundational layer that most AI adoption conversations skip. An organisation that deploys AI tools without understanding data quality requirements or accountability structures is not more efficient; it is faster at making the same class of errors, with less visibility into where they originate.
The ITCILO framework is useful here precisely because it does not treat AI as a product to be installed. It treats it as a capability to be developed, one that requires the people operating procurement systems to understand the logic of the tools, not just their outputs. That distinction matters enormously in a public sector context, where accountability runs through institutions, not algorithms.
The Bangladesh context
Bangladesh’s public procurement system has made significant progress over the past decade. Digital systems have replaced manual processes across large portions of government tendering, improving traceability and reducing certain categories of procedural error. The e-GP system, which handles a substantial volume of government contract tendering, has been a credible step forward in procurement transparency.
The next stage, integrating AI into planning, evaluation, and contract oversight, is a different order of challenge. It requires not just technical capability but institutional readiness: structured data, clear accountability frameworks, and trained personnel who understand both the tools and their limitations. Bangladesh’s FY2026–27 budget has earmarked significant investment in digital infrastructure and skills development. Procurement systems are a direct beneficiary of that direction, but only if the organisations managing them are prepared to absorb and apply the change.
That is where the gap between having a digital system and having an AI-ready one becomes consequential. A system that records procurement transactions is not the same as one that can analyse patterns, flag anomalies, and support strategic decision-making. Moving from the former to the latter requires exactly the kind of structured, practitioner-level training that ITCILO delivered in Turin.
What Dohatec takes back
Dohatec’s leadership returning from Turin with ITCILO certification and direct exposure to international procurement AI applications is an investment in that next stage. The company is not just a technology vendor in this context; it is a knowledge institution. Building internal capacity at the director level, through rigorous external training, is what allows that role to be credible.
There is also a signalling function that goes beyond Dohatec’s own operations. When a Bangladeshi IT company sends its CEO and three directors to a five-day international AI training programme, it communicates something to clients, partners, and the broader sector about what standard-setting looks like. The knowledge brought back from Turin does not stay inside Dohatec. It feeds into the systems, training programmes, and institutional advice that shape how Bangladesh’s public procurement infrastructure develops.
The quality of the systems we build is inseparable from the quality of the judgment behind them. Investing in that judgment, at the most senior level, is the work that does not show up in a product release but determines whether every product release that follows is built on solid ground.