Ulfan Aliyev is the Chief Commercial Officer of the National Artificial Intelligence Center of Azerbaijan, the country’s central institution for advancing artificial intelligence, established in line with the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of the Republic of Azerbaijan for 2025–2028. Appointed to this role in July 2026, he leads the Center’s commercial strategy, overseeing the commercialization of national AI products, revenue development, and strategic partnerships across the private sector, the public sector, and government-to-government (G2G) cooperation.

Prior to his current appointment, Mr. Aliyev served as Senior Product Owner at the Center, where he led the first large language model project in Azerbaijan — the e-qanun.ai legal search engine tailored to the Azerbaijani language — driving legal technology innovation in the country. He also managed DataRace, Azerbaijan’s first machine learning and artificial intelligence competition platform, designed to solve real-life problems and foster local AI talent, and contributed to the creation and formulation of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of the Republic of Azerbaijan for 2025–2028, helping lay the foundational roadmap for national AI policy and technological advancement.

Before joining the Center, Mr. Aliyev held product and business development roles in the financial sector. At fintech company Simbrella, his machine-learning-driven credit optimization and scoring initiatives delivered record revenue growth, while at Kapital Bank he developed churn-prediction and customer-segmentation models that materially improved retention and personalization. He holds a Master of Business Administration and a BSc in Finance from the Azerbaijan State University of Economics, including an Erasmus exchange at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, and is a certified Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO II) with a FinTech certificate from Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning.