Evaluation in Times of Uncertainty - AI and Professionalization in Georgia

Five practitioners from different parts of the world bring concrete experience of AI in evaluation to the table. Two cases examine what AI actually does to evidence quality: one focused on qualitative work, what tools are being used, what they change, and what they risk, and one focused on quantitative analysis, asking the same hard questions from a different methodological angle. A third case zooms out, looking at how evaluators are navigating a landscape of multiple AI tools across a single evaluation and what it takes to make those decisions well. The fourth brings it closer to home, drawing on emerging AI practices in evaluation in Georgia and what the local experience reveals about a global shift. Taken together, the cases surface something important: AI does not arrive the same way in every evaluation. It lands differently depending on method, context, and what the evidence is ultimately for. From that grounded base, the session closes with a broader frame. Drawing on original research across six major global evaluator competency frameworks, it asks what the cases make unavoidable, when AI is shaping how evidence is generated and interpreted, what must remain irreducibly human?

If the morning asks what AI is doing to evaluation, the afternoon asks what evaluators and the academia around them, must do for the profession. Building a recognisable evaluation profession in a country where institutional landscapes shift quickly, where monitoring is too often mistaken for evaluation, and where the field rarely appears in academic curricula and then only as a fragment within other subjects, raises questions that extend well beyond credentials. This panel takes Georgia as both starting point and case. Drawing on the University of Georgia's leading academic approach to evaluation, MELPA's voice as the country's professional association, and HubEVAL's work as the first university-anchored evaluation hub for Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, the panel examines how associations, university curricula, and donor practice together shape or fail to shape evaluation as a recognised profession. The discussion is enriched by perspectives from established evaluation associations and academic experiences in Europe and beyond, asking what evaluation quality, ethics, and critical evaluation literacy mean as components of democratic infrastructure and where the next decade of professionalization in Georgia needs to go.