The governments of Estonia and Ukraine are racing ahead to harness artificial intelligence, which they believe is crucial to building societies that can fend off Russian assaults—whether by missiles or denial-of-service attacks.
At Oct. 9’s Tallinn Digital Summit,, Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal said the country aims to sit “among world leaders in AI,” a technology he said is “shaping the future of democracy, the global order, and our shared security.”
The sentiments are hardly unique, but they’re the latest expression of the aggressive digital modernization pursued by Tallinn since a Russian cyberattack that took essential services offline in 2007.
“Estonia knows what it means to live on the digital frontline. AI gives us an advantage that size alone cannot. This is why we have an AI strategy for defense and a Force Transformation Command within the Estonian Defense Forces. With industry, startups, and the military working side by side, we move from idea to field faster,” Michal told an audience of international technology executives and government officials. “Russia’s war has made one thing clear: the side that can integrate technology faster has the advantage. Ukraine has shown it. So, while supporting them in every way, we also learn from them.”
This means more than buying AI tools and services, he said: it means completely rethinking governmental structure and function.
The “agentic” AI state
Michal didn’t go into great detail about what that means, but his government contributed to a white paper released at the summit that spells out a detailed vision for how leaders could use AI to draft policies and laws, implement them, and expand government services while reducing costs.
The paper is the work of a digital-innovation group called the Agentic State, headquartered in Estonia with members from governments such as Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union and institutions such as the World Bank.
It centers on the idea of “agentic AI,” which covers an emerging set of tools that go beyond the conversations of a large language model—think ChatGPT—to take real-world actions. Agentic AI can make decisions with limited human supervision, such as executing a marketing campaign, researching and writing a daily newsletter, or responding to and fixing customer complaints. Amazon is already using such tools to identify vendors, make orders, and pay invoices for many supply orders. Google uses them to find the best routes for web traffic.
The paper argues that government should be transformed to bring autonomous decision-making to many of its processes.
Ukraine—already a leader in online access to government services—is working on it. AI should be “the foundation of public administration, from automating routine processes to delivering personalized services for every citizen,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s first vice prime minister, wrote in the paper, adding that the agentic state “understands people’s needs, offers solutions, and provides the right tools. Ukraine is already moving toward a model where just one request or a single voice message stands between a person’s need and the result.”
Estonia, too, is moving to have citizens interact with their government primarily through AI, at least for many essential exchanges. Luukas Kristjan Ilves, a Stanford-educated technologist who has helped Ukraine stand up its digital-government program, is playing a critical role.
“This isn’t just chatbots,” Ilves told a small gathering of technology experts in Tallinn on the eve of the summit. “This is multimodal interaction that really meets the user wherever they are, and that could be a government agent. So that could be a government chatbot that will speak to you in any language, that will show up in your VR glasses, but it could also be allowing you, with the agent you have on your smartphone, to consume public services natively, without having to go through a website.”
He said citizens would see a drastic reduction in the time it takes, for example, to get a business license or access benefits.
AI can also improve how governments work internally, especially the way they buy things.
“Public procurement, which is 10 percent of global GDP, is a broken process today, broken for perfectly good reasons. We have lots of rules and regulations around it, but we can replace human buying with agentic buying in a way that delivers much more public value.”
And Estonia is already working to harness AI for national defense, to give its 1.3 million people an “advantage that size alone cannot,” as Ilves put it. “AI is more than defense. Innovation and productivity keep nations strong long after wars end.”
AI might even one day play a role in policy, enabling lawmakers and regulators to shape new laws and rules based on data.
“Now, what we can’t do today, and probably won’t be able to do for a while, is to hand an entire policy area to the AI and say, ‘OK, you run social everything. You know what? Adjust. Don’t just do the benefits claims; adjust the social policy, steer it off.’ That’s going to require humans for a while,” Ilves said.
Ultimately, though, Ilves envisions experts within government not simply buying technology but fundamentally rethinking how government can work better when institutions and core government services—from issuing licenses to acquiring defense tools—can be remade through AI.
“We’re not just talking about slapping technology on top of government. It is going to require a very thorough, deep re-engineering of the processes of how government works, and this is what we’re calling the agentic state—government that has really been redesigned to take advantage of these capabilities that technology now offers us, and to break that down again into something that’s a little bit more specific and analytical,” he said.
Defense One asked several participants at the summit whether they believed the United States could follow Estonia’s lead. Respondents, who preferred to speak on background, were not optimistic. One of them said that reforming government for the AI age is possible only in an environment where the citizenry has a large degree of trust in their government. The United States, the respondent said, “just does not have that right now.”
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