Getting to Know Irakli

I am Dr. Irakli Petriashvili, a Certified Public Sector Auditor and Associate Professor at the University of Georgia in Tbilisi. My work sits where artificial intelligence meets public governance. I study how governments can use AI and data to protect public money, detect fraud and corruption, and serve citizens better.

My path started inside the public sector. For seven years at the State Audit Office of Georgia, I have audited how public money is actually spent across infrastructure, road construction, regional development, energy, agriculture, entrepreneurship development, environmental protection, state property management and tourism. My audits also cover state-owned enterprises in which the government holds at least 50 percent equity, and projects financed by international partners including the World Bank (IBRD), EBRD, ADB, KfW and USAID. That work taught me that corruption rarely hides in grand schemes. It hides in weak processes, missing data and records nobody has time to read. Behind every audit finding were people: patients waiting for hospitals, families waiting for roads, communities waiting for services that were paid for but never delivered.

That experience shapes my research today. As a GI ACE Research Fellow at the University of Sussex Centre for the Study of Corruption, I study how Supreme Audit Institutions can use AI to reduce corruption risks in public finance across Eastern Europe. As a Research Fellow at the Weiser Center for Europe & Eurasia at the University of Michigan, I am developing a unified framework for using AI against corruption in the US federal government. Earlier, I led an IBM-funded project at Rutgers University's Transparency and Governance Center on AI and metadata analytics for federal financial auditing and fraud detection.

My work has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence, an IBM Center for the Business of Government research award and support from Google Research. It has also been supported by international partners including the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swedish Government, the US Department of State and UNODC.

I am also part of a wide international community of researchers, auditors and policymakers. I am a member of ATARC's Fraud Detection and Mitigation Working Group in the United States, the ASOSAI Working Group on State-Owned Enterprises Audit, and the Anti-Corruption Advocacy Network, and I serve as a Scientist in the European COST Action on Futures-oriented Governance of Outer Space.

Teaching matters to me as much as research. I translate my research and audit practice into teaching, and I design and deliver training courses and on-the-job training for senior public officials, auditors and accountability professionals around the world.

My mission is to use rigorous evidence to find where public administration is most vulnerable, and to help institutions fix those weaknesses with technology, including AI. At the same time, I assess whether the technologies governments use work responsibly, treat citizens fairly and meet legal and regulatory requirements. Technology is only the means. The goal is public trust in both directions: citizens should be able to see where their money goes, and understand how the technologies, AI systems and algorithms that make decisions about their lives actually work.

"Corruption dies in sunlight, but only if that sunlight reaches every shadow."