The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Education Industry in Kazakhstan in 2025

Kazakhstan's 2025 education push puts AI at the center of classrooms and career pipelines: the government has made AI a mandatory discipline across 93 universities and is folding the state-backed Aisana program into curricula, while a pilot with MIT introduces AI lessons for grades 1–4 as part of Digital Literacy and Informatics - moves that already saw some 390,000 learners complete foundational AI courses and about 3,000 gain certification.

Alongside new ethical standards, teacher professional development and school‑connectivity upgrades, national hubs like Alem.ai aim to turn classroom skills into exportable products (target: $5 billion by 2029).

For schools and educators looking to act now, practical applied training such as Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work can fast‑track the prompt writing and tool-use skills needed to bring multimodal Kazakh- and Russian-language resources into everyday lessons.

Read more about the university mandate and school rollout in the Astana Times and Kazinform reports.

Bootcamp	Length	Early-bird Cost	Register
AI Essentials for Work	15 Weeks	$3,582	Register for AI Essentials for Work - Nucamp

“I have already spoken about accelerating the creation of a unified national digital ecosystem,”

Kazakhstan's 2025 national mandates make AI education a system-wide priority: the government is rolling AI elements into core school subjects (starting in 2025–2026 with “Digital Literacy” and “Informatics”), piloting MIT‑developed “Day of AI” lessons for grades 1–4 (30–60 minute, teacher‑guided modules translated into Kazakh and Russian), and pushing full school coverage alongside massive connectivity upgrades [see the government brief].

At the same time, higher education has been reshaped - AI is now a mandatory discipline across 93 universities and programs like Aisana/AI‑Sana are being folded into curricula so students gain practical experience and pathways to industry and startups.

Officials have approved ethical standards for AI in schools, prepared three‑level professional development for teachers, and scheduled fibre‑optic connections and school modernizations to make hands‑on AI learning possible in both cities and rural areas.

These top‑down policies aim to convert classrooms into talent pipelines - 390,000 learners have already completed specialized AI courses and about 3,000 earned certificates - creating the foundation for local innovation and exportable AI products.

Read the rollout and connectivity plan in the prime minister's summary and coverage of university mandates.

Metric	Figure / Note
Total schools	8,042
Schools connected to Internet	7,917
Connected via fiber‑optic (FOC)	4,663
Planned Kazakhtelecom FOC connections (2025–2026)	2,010 (819 in 2025; 1,191 in 2026)
Universities with mandatory AI	93
Students completed specialized AI course	390,000
Official certificates awarded	≈3,000
Day of AI lesson length	30–60 minutes (with teacher materials)

“Every student will be able to learn how to apply AI in their profession, develop new technologies, or create start-ups in the future,”

Curriculum changes in 2025 steer Kazakhstan from awareness to hands‑on AI: schools will weave AI elements into Digital Literacy and Informatics beginning in 2025–2026, with an MIT‑developed “Day of AI” pilot (30–60 minute, teacher‑guided lessons translated into Kazakh and Russian) for grades 1–4 and staged expansion through grades 1–12 as materials are adapted; colleges and vocational programs will also embed AI, and extracurricular hubs like new TUMO centres in Astana and Almaty promise free, practice‑focused pathways in generative AI, robotics and design for thousands of students.

These curriculum moves sit beside a national connectivity push - 819 schools will gain fibre in 2025 and 1,191 in 2026 so every school can run interactive, multimodal lessons - so teacher development (three‑level professional training and new management standards for Keleshek mektepteri) becomes the linchpin between modern classrooms and real workplace skills.

For details on the President's instruction and the staged rollout, see the government brief and the coverage of the connectivity and pilot program.

Metric	Figure / Note
Total schools	8,042
Schools connected to Internet	7,917
Connected via fiber‑optic (FOC)	4,663
Planned FOC connections (2025–2026)	2,010 (819 in 2025; 1,191 in 2026)
Day of AI lesson length	30–60 minutes (teacher materials, Kazakh & Russian)
TUMO annual training capacity (Astana & Almaty)	plan: >10,000 students

“The main goal is to ensure that in September, students return to comfortable, bright, and renovated educational organizations that meet modern standards,”

Official government brief: President's instruction on digitalization and AI education in Kazakhstan Media coverage of Kazakhstan connectivity upgrades and Day of AI pilot rollout (Intelligent Edu, Aug 2025)

Teacher training has been recast as the practical engine behind Kazakhstan's AI and school reforms: the Ministry prepared online “Day of AI” modules and a three‑level professional development pathway so that teachers can move from awareness to classroom practice, and a new continuous professional development platform launched on 1 January 2025 to scale certification and support (see the government brief on three‑level training).

In 2025 more than 11,000 teachers took professional development courses - about 58% of them from rural schools - showing the reach of these programmes beyond major cities and into smaller communities (detailed rollout and participation figures are available in the May 2025 reforms summary).

Practical links to industry are expanding too: dual training and employer internships are growing (1,500 teachers will do internships this year, and enterprises providing mentorship have increased sevenfold), while over 3,000 teachers who completed the intensive three‑level courses are being deployed in Keleshek mektepteri (“Schools of the Future”), creating a visible pipeline of freshly certified mentors ready to run multimodal AI lessons and vocational collaborations.

These concrete moves - systematic upskilling, rural inclusion, and employer partnerships - turn policy goals into teacher skills that students will feel in everyday lessons.

Read the ministerial update on AI and training and the national reforms note for the numbers and next steps.

Metric	Figure / Note
Teachers who took PD (2025)	More than 11,000 (≈58% rural)
Three‑level trained teachers for Keleshek mektepteri	More than 3,000
Total teachers (2024)	≈406,000
Teacher shortage (2024)	≈4,000 (about half in rural areas)
Principals needed (2025)	740
Continuous PD platform	Phased launch started 1 Jan 2025; target certification ~150,000 teachers

“The main goal is to ensure that in September, students return to comfortable, bright, and renovated educational organizations that meet modern standards,”

Higher education and national research centres are now the engine room for Kazakhstan's AI classroom tools: Nazarbayev University's Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) has produced a suite of models tailored to local needs - an open, Kazakh‑centred large language model (ISSAI KAZ‑LLM) designed to work in Kazakh, Russian and English, multimodal language‑vision systems like Oylan (trained on an enormous national dataset of over 10 million images and 50 million question–answer pairs) and the follow‑up Oylan2 with added audio capabilities, and Beynele, a culturally aware text‑to‑image generator tuned to Kazakh ornaments, clothing and steppe landscapes.

These assets (KAZ‑LLM's 8B and 70B parameter versions built on Llama and released under CC‑BY‑NC, Oylan's public pilot and API on the ISSAI Playground, and Beynele's multilingual image output) give universities, edtech teams and curriculum designers local, multimodal building blocks for Kazakh‑language textbooks, voice‑enabled tutors and classroom visuals that feel authentic to students' lives; the striking scale - over 150 billion tokens processed for Kazakh LLM work and millions of labeled images - means tools can be both language‑accurate and culturally resonant, shortening the path from research lab to lesson plan.

Explore ISSAI's work on the KAZ‑LLM, the Oylan pilot, and Beynele for practical integration options in classrooms and campus research.

Model	Organization	Modalities	Languages	Key stats / notes
ISSAI KAZ-LLM	ISSAI (Nazarbayev Univ.)	Text (LLM)	Kazakh, Russian, English (plus Turkish support)	Two versions: 8B & 70B params; ~150B tokens; Llama-based; CC-BY-NC; Hugging Face
Oylan	ISSAI	Language–vision (text + images)	Kazakh, Russian, English	Training data: >10M images, 50M QA pairs; public pilot & API on ISSAI Playground
Oylan2	ISSAI	Language–audio–vision (text, image, audio)	Kazakh, Russian, English	Improved text processing, fewer hallucinations; strong audio ASR and speech features
Beynele	ISSAI	Text-to-image (diffusion)	Kazakh, Russian, English	Culturally aware visuals (traditional ornaments, clothing, steppe scenes); designed for authentic local imagery

“With Beynele, we're building technology that doesn't just generate images - it understands identity,” said Amina Baikenova, IT Product Manager at ISSAI.

Public–private partnerships and international collaborations are the practical backbone of Kazakhstan's 2025 AI-in-education push: memorandums with global players - from Coursera and Google to NVIDIA and Huawei - have fast-tracked course content, localized materials and industry-grade training pathways, while joint projects fund hackathons, bootcamps and compute capacity to turn classroom learning into real projects; the Ministry's Coursera programme alone has reached roughly 111,000 learners and helped modernize 93 universities, integrating thousands of online courses into degree tracks memorandums with Coursera, Google, NVIDIA, and Huawei for AI education partnerships and offering targeted pilots such as Google Cloud's Generative AI pathway for some 6,000 students on the Cloud Skills Boost platform; NVIDIA's collaboration adds not just curricula but supercomputing muscle and Deep Learning Institute training for local faculty and students, creating a visible pipeline from translated, credit-bearing online courses to industry internships, startup support and national labs that can scale multimodal Kazakh- and Russian-language tools for classrooms and local edtech.

This networked approach turns policy into practice: students gain job-relevant certificates and universities gain pathways to international research and talent exchange, while the private sector gets a clearer route to co-designing curricula and discovering hires.

“We are part of the global chain at its lowest level by producing raw materials. If you want to move up higher on the value-added chain, you need a workforce. You need trained people, professionals, and engineers, who do the processing, [and] who add value. To add value, it all comes down to your universities and colleges.” - Sayasat Nurbek, Minister of Science and Higher Education

Kazakhstan's infrastructure push is moving from plans to classrooms: of 8,042 schools nationwide, 7,917 already have Internet access and 4,663 are on fiber‑optic lines, with an investment deal with JSC Kazakhtelecom set to add 2,010 more FOC connections (819 in 2025; 1,191 in 2026) so every school can run multimodal AI lessons; officials also note up to 450 remaining “last‑mile” links could be completed quickly where fiber already reaches the settlement.

Satellite networks are filling gaps too - the official Starlink launch follows successful 2023–24 rural pilots (over 1,700 schools received terminals), promising high‑performance service for remote classrooms and cloud tools.

At the same time, Kazakhstan has built more than 1,200 new schools since 2019 (422 opened in 2023–24) and rolled out digital services like the Social Wallet and Business Wallet to modernize school meals and administration; creative hubs such as TUMO centres in Astana and Almaty will train more than 10,000 students a year in digital skills.

For practical details, see the government brief on school connectivity and the write‑up on Starlink's launch and rural pilots.

Metric	Figure / Note
Total schools	8,042
Schools connected to Internet	7,917
Connected via fiber‑optic (FOC)	4,663
Planned Kazakhtelecom FOC (2025–2026)	2,010 (819 in 2025; 1,191 in 2026)
Starlink rural pilot / installs (2023–24)	1,731 of 1,879 schools (reported in 2024)
Public secondary schools in Social Wallet pilot	6,943 (2,369 fully equipped; 3,950 use Business Wallet)

“The development of digitalisation in Kazakhstan serves as an example not only for Central Asia but for other regions worldwide. IEC Telecom Kazakhstan is ready to participate in this process and to launch new projects in the country, drawing on our international experience in implementing Starlink-based solutions. It is not only a matter of know-how - as a direct Starlink partner, we have prepared special tariffs for Kazakhstan,” commented Nabil Ben Soussia, Chief Commercial Officer, IEC Telecom Group.

Kazakhstan's extracurricular ecosystem is building real talent pipelines alongside classroom reform: free hubs and bootcamps - from the new TUMO creative technologies centre at the Alem.ai International Center free AI training programs (planned to train thousands annually) to the peer‑to‑peer Tomorrow School - offer hands‑on pathways in generative AI, robotics, game design and 3D modelling; Tomorrow School's two‑year, tuition‑free campus even provides 24/7 workshops and apartments for regional students so practice and community learning never stop.

Long‑running initiatives like Tech Orda have already trained nearly 10,000 people, while national events - Decentrathon and the AI Olympiad (683 competitors, 40 finalists, 12 winners invited to training camps) - turn classroom skills into competitive projects and startup teams.

Programs such as AI Preneurs, AI Qyzmet (16,000+ civil servants trained) and Research Orda's free summer research internships further link curious students to mentors, employers and international stages, creating visible stepping stones from after‑school clubs to paid internships and startup formations.

Program	Key figure
TUMO at Alem.ai	Target: 5,000 students annually (expand nationwide)
Tech Orda	Nearly 10,000 trained since 2021
Tomorrow School	Two‑year peer‑to‑peer AI program; 24/7 campus; 30% women
Decentrathon / Hackathons	~2,500 participants (recent editions)
AI Olympiad	683 participants; 40 finalists; 12 winners to training camps
AI Qyzmet (civil servants)	16,000+ trained; target 30,000/year

“The goal is to shape a generation ready to create and use technologies, not just consume them.”

Start small, stay practical, and build confidence: begin lessons with the free, ready‑made “Day of AI” 30–60 minute modules (an MIT‑partnered pilot translated into Kazakh and Russian) so every teacher can trial a short, guided activity in digital literacy classrooms Day of AI pilot details in Kazakhstan; next, enrol staff in bite‑sized professional courses tied to the national rollout - Kazakhstan now requires AI study across state universities, and many scaffolded trainings and certifications exist to move teachers from awareness to classroom practice Kazakhstan makes AI education mandatory at universities.

Pair short lessons with local tools and datasets where possible (national models and image/audio generators developed at Nazarbayev University make Kazakh‑language and culturally relevant content feasible), and use community hubs or bootcamps to extend practice time for both teachers and motivated students.

Audit connectivity first - if fiber or satellite access is limited, prioritise offline prompts, printed multimodal aids, and teacher peer‑coaching so momentum continues.

A vivid starting goal: run a single 45‑minute Day of AI lesson, have students ask one question to an LLM in Kazakh or Russian, and use the output to co‑create a classroom poster - a small, visible win that converts policy into everyday learning.

Metric	Figure / Note
Universities with mandatory AI	93
Learners completing foundational AI courses	≈390,000
Teachers certified (foundational programs)	≈3,000
Day of AI lesson length	30–60 minutes (teacher‑guided)

“Every student will be able to learn how to apply AI in their profession, develop new technologies, or create start-ups in the future,”

Kazakhstan's AI-in-education story in 2025 is at once practical and high‑stakes: the country has laid impressive groundwork - from national programs like AI‑Sana to MIT‑partnered classroom pilots - but the real test is scaling what works without widening the digital divide, strengthening teacher capacity, and protecting student data while keeping learning relevant to jobs and the green transition (the World Bank warns a child born today may reach only 63% of their productivity potential unless human‑capital investments continue).

That means marrying top‑down initiatives described in the Astana Times with local innovation (see the AI‑Sana rollout at Korkyt University) and classroom-ready upskilling: short, applied courses such as Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work offer a pragmatic bridge - helping teachers and school leaders learn prompt design, multimodal tool use, and workplace applications so lessons become both culturally relevant and job‑linked.

The next phase will hinge on careful pilots, rigorous monitoring, and partnerships that convert research models and hub capacity into everyday learning tools across Kazakh and Russian classrooms; done well, Kazakhstan can move from importing AI know‑how to producing the trained workforce that turns policy into sustained economic value.

For practical entry points, explore the national briefs and consider targeted professional courses that align pedagogy, infrastructure and ethics for scale.

Bootcamp	Length	Early‑bird Cost	Register
AI Essentials for Work	15 Weeks	$3,582	Register for the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp - Nucamp

“Education and learning are among the strongest drivers of growth,”