In its annual report, Smals looks back on a challenging year but also looks ahead to what the future holds for digital government. AI promises to be a major focus.

Smals presents its annual report for 2022 today. The IT company for and through the public sector, as Smals calls itself, continued to grow. Revenue grew to EUR 439.5 million and the number of employees to 2,089. Smals achieved several important milestones over the past year, with the launch of GovApp being one of the highlights. But Smals also has projects in healthcare, government, defense and more.

dance in the rain

In their foreword, Pierre Vandervorst (Chairman) and Frank Robben (CEO) emphasize that it is important for the public sector to remain innovative. In 2022, our society plunged from one crisis to the next. The coronavirus pandemic has given way to an energy crisis, inflation and economic pressures, while the Ukrainian defense war is back on the political agenda.

At the same time, the government must ensure that all citizens, regardless of age, origin and level of education, participate in the accelerated digitization. “We learned to dance in the rain,” it sounds symbolic.

attention to AI

In 2022 we saw renewed interest in artificial intelligence, and 2023 will be no different. The Smals research team investigates the rapid developments in AI and the usability of current technology, from supporting software development to improving interaction with citizens and businesses to supporting data analysis.

Specifically, Smals Research will develop a module for named entity recognition in 2022. Machine learning recognizes personal names, addresses, place names, and phone numbers, and “regular expressions” quickly identify dates, zip codes, URLs, email addresses, bank account numbers, social security numbers, and KBO numbers. The module can be accessed from other applications via an API.

In 2023, Smals aims to further expand the API ecosystem to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence in the public sector. But the focus is also on cryptography to protect the personal data of citizens. A generic service for pseudonymization is being developed, whereby the use of “synthetic” data is also possible.