Implementation of Artificial Intelligence-Oriented Digital Government Policy in Malang City: A Quantitative Analysis of Index Achievement and Institutional Readiness, 2022-2026

Abstract

This study examines how Malang City's digital government policy has performed on a conventional maturity index between 2022 and 2024, and asks how far that performance has been matched by concrete institutional readiness for artificial intelligence (AI) specifically, following the city government's November 2023 declaration of an ambition to become an "Artificial Intelligence City." A descriptive quantitative, ex post facto design was used, drawing on official secondary data from Malang City Government releases, national digital-government regulations, and credible mass media, analyzed through time-series trend analysis, a target-achievement gap analysis, an elapsed-time lag analysis measuring the interval between the AI-city declaration and each subsequent verifiable AI-related action, and a content-analysis inventory of the city's binding digital-government planning instruments. Malang City's Electronic-Based Government System (SPBE) index rose sharply, from 2.60 in 2022 to 3.82 in 2023 and 4.24 in 2024, reaching 140% of the 3.02 target set for 2024-2026 in Mayoral Regulation No. 5/2023 and placing the city among the eight best-performing cities nationally. Yet neither of the city's two binding digital-government planning instruments in force during the observation period, the 2022 Smart City Master Plan and Mayoral Regulation No. 8/2023 on the Electronic-Based Government System, contains any explicit provision for artificial intelligence. The first concrete, verifiable AI-based public service, a multilingual chatbot named TANIA, was launched approximately 21 months after the declaration, not by the core city government but by a semi-autonomous municipal water utility; the first city-government action explicitly branded as an AI program, a digital-literacy workshop, followed at approximately 29 months and was itself described by the issuing agency as only an initial stage. The study concludes that Malang City's strong, well-documented progress on conventional digital-government maturity has not yet been matched by a comparable degree of formal AI governance, and that the imminent national shift to an AI-inclusive digital-government evaluation instrument makes closing that institutional gap an increasingly urgent priority.