CW+ Premium Content/CW EMEA

In May this year, Estonia’s latest member of the workforce will start its work providing personalised support to citizens when they use government services. Named Bürokratt, the Siri-like digital assistant will help citizens carry out tasks such as submitting applications and making payments, all through voice commands. It will even proactively contact citizens to remind them if they need to complete a task such as renew a driving licence, register a birth or file their tax return, and promises to save the government millions of Euros in administrative costs to make citizens’ lives easier. There is no other project like it, and it’s another example of Estonia leading the way in digital government. Ott Velsberg, chief data officer of Estonia’s ministry of economic affairs and communications, said that when he joined the ministry in 2018, his first public sector role, he began working on how artificial intelligence (AI) could revolutionise government, education and the private sector. Velsberg, who has a PhD in informatics, had ...