The article examines the educational market as an ecosystem where key participants interact: universities, employers and students. The author analyzes the role of each of these entities in shaping consumer behavior in the educational market. Particular attention is paid to the interdependence of their interests, the dynamics of interaction and the influence of external factors, such as technological changes and digitalization. The study demonstrates that universities act not only as providers of educational services, but also as an important link in creating competencies in demand in the labor market.

This article discusses foreign experiences of developing digital services in the regional industry and their application in the country, as well as the need to apply foreign experiences in practice to solve the problems of sustainable development of industrial sectors in the digital economy, the need to develop deep machine learning algorithms, and large foreign companies, universities and scientific agencies are currently working in the field of AI. There is a list of more than 1,000 startups working in this area. The leaders are well-known brands such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, DARPA and others. For example, Microsoft has made a big leap in speech recognition, its speech recognition system is now able to recognize speech by a living person.

International university rankings have become strong tools of governance that impact strategic institutional policies and higher education reforms on the global front. In the case of emerging systems like Uzbekistan, rankings are a challenge as well as a chance to be recognized in the world. This paper presents the response of universities in Uzbekistan to the ranking pressures based on interviews with administrators of a public, private, and international branch campus university, and review of national policy documents. The results leave a very clear picture of contrasts between the private and international universities: international branding, autonomy in decision-making, and research incentives are indicators of structured approaches to ranking whereas bureaucratic rigidity, lack of autonomy, and inadequate allocation of resources characterize universities in public. The more important determinant of competitiveness turns out to be governance capacity, not ambition. The paper concludes that to achieve sustainable progress in rankings, reforms to governance are needed that increase autonomy, accountability, and institutional capacity and integrate rankings into larger education, research, and development missions.