Thailand pursues AI innovation, while concurrently dealing with legacy

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Is the Thai government-led superapp “Thang Rath” only good for its digital wallet?

Previous media reports have pointed to government handouts being a key motivating factor for people to download the app.

When the finance ministry made its first announcement last July, the app downloads surged more than fifteen times from around 60,000 to 900,000. And when the handouts happened, this figure went up to 20 million within just 48 hours.

But Thang Rath is proving itself to be more than just a wallet for government handouts – as the agency behind the app, the Digital Government Development Agency (DGA), has been hard at work making a use case for more efficient citizen-service delivery.

A superapp is a mobile application that integrates a wide range of services into one platform – in the case of Thang Rath, serving as a one-stop shop for various government services.

When it launched in 2021, it started with some 30 government services. Thang Rath has since expanded to 173 services, as of this January, with an average of over 500,000 users per day, says DGA’s Senior Executive Vice President, Acting President and CEO, Airada Luangvilai.

Speaking to GovInsider, Luangvilai says DGA is now considering weaving artificial intelligence (AI) into the app to enable smarter search of government services, and to deliver personalised and proactive services to citizens.

Aside from service delivery, DGA wants to tap into AI to drive broader governance goals – enabling data-driven policymaking, as well as optimising services by being able to forecast the public needs.

“This allows us to address challenges proactively,” she adds.

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Legacy in the way

When millions tried to register on the payout date, there were reportedly glitches with the Thang Rath system due to overloading.

Luangvilai shares that one of the significant challenges faced in digital governance has been overcoming the reliance on legacy systems which have been used by many government agencies for decades.

Additionally, these agencies have been working in silos for a long time, she adds.

DGA has been tasked to drive a cloud-first policy within the Thai government, by managing cloud service providers, setting data classification frameworks, and overseeing cloud plans and budgets.

DGA’s official statement emphasises both cloud and AI adoption in the government policy.

To facilitate cloud use, DGA also rolled out the workD communication platform to centralise all chats, meetings, and storage across all government agencies on one platform.

This also supports hybrid working arrangements and enables government officials to connect and work together even when they are at different locations.

“Cooperation between agencies has become much smoother. This is because agencies now recognise the benefits of organisational development through the adoption of technology,” she notes.

Manage what you can measure

Since 2015, DGA has been conducting the Digital Government Development Readiness survey to assess its digitalisation progress across agencies, and uses these results to award its selected agencies.

While it fared relatively well in providing data in open formats and leveraging technology to streamline internal processes (80 per cent and more), only 66 per cent of the agencies have adopted and implemented data governance standards.

Luangvilai shares that one of the goals of DGA is to promote data accessibility to empower users and enable citizen participation through “an open government,” which is one of the four strategies highlighted in the Thailand Digital Government Development Plan 2023-2027.

Businesses can also leverage open-source resources and government data to grow and innovate, she adds.

To ramp up efforts around data use, the Big Data Institute (BDI) was spinned off as standalone organisation in February 2024 from the Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA), while remaining under the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society Thailand (MDES).

“Our job is to make Thailand a little bit more data driven. We’re still doing data integration and analytics services for government agencies.

“We engage communities like private sectors and several associations to build [large-language] models and human capital.

“But the main agenda would be, how do you make use of government data for private sector to the best?” said BDI’s Director, Dr Tiranee Achalaku, to GovInsider in a separate conversation.

Dr Achalakul said in another article that BDI is tackling the problem of siloed data in the government through a national big data platform that will launch this year.

National blockchain ecosystem

Luangvilai shares that plans are underway for DGA to develop a blockchain-based network infrastructure to deploy proof-of-concepts (POC) to support smart contract applications and other use cases.

The infrastructure will be able to support test cases with no less than one million users per day, she adds.

In cases like voting systems and land registries, blockchain can help enhance security, transparency and efficiency in various government applications, she notes.

“DGA will provide monitoring tools for the distribution of blockchain nodes that are given to the government agencies to be used in developing various systems,” she adds.

Thailand is yet another country whose government is looking to be involved in the digital asset space.

Last month, Thailand’s Minister of Finance, Pichai Chunhavajira, announced plans to issue a Thai Baht stablecoin backed by government bonds.

The government is also developing a trading platform for stablecoins, with the plan to use it for everyday payments, Ledger Insights reported.