October 21 2025—Visiting Estonia this week, I asked Dr Ott Velsberg, the Government Chief Data Officer, if he would share some of the principles his country is following for advancing A.I. in government safely and responsibly. Estonia is famous after all for placing information technology and e-government at the very centre of its national identity, and Estonians I talk to love that every government interaction is electronic, that their data connects across services so they don’t have to enter it twice, and that a few taps on their phone tells them who has accessed their data and for what purpose. Safe to assume, then, that policymakers here have also been thinking deeply about how best to implement A.I. So what can we learn from the journey so far? What principles might be helpful to other governments?

We met at the Joint Ministry Building in Suur-Ameerika street. Here are the takeaways from our conversation.

CITIZEN PERMISSIONS EXTEND TO AI

The principle that every citizen can see who accesses their data, and set permissions over who can access their data, extends to A.I. The goal with all these principles is to stay as technology agnostic as possible. I asked Ott if this would extend to permissions to use personal data for AI training and he said yes.

PUSHING AI-ENABLED EFFICIENCY

No surprises. Hundreds of projects are underway to improve government efficiency using A.I. It fits with the long-standing strategy of placing information technology skills at the center of the economy. Continual government service improvement is also nowadays what citizens expect, which brings its own pressures. As Ott put it, “The number of people involved in delivering government hasn’t increased, but the expectations continue to increase!”

PROACTIVE CITIZEN SERVICES

A strong theme is using A.I. to create citizen services that are proactive. Again the principle is that each individual citizen can choose which proactive services they get or not. Examples mentioned:- proactive health advice, proactive advice about when job skills may be out of date and your job at risk; proactive salary benchmarking for employers and employees.

To my mind, proactive health services are a particularly significant opportunity in Estonia. Small nudges towards healthier behaviours can translate to big public health outcomes (and big savings to the public purse). Here, electronic health records are universal as well as accessible across public and private healthcare providers, almost 100% of data generated in hospitals is digital, and a fifth of citizens have DNA in the Estonian Bio Bank. You’d have to think that this will be one of the counties to watch when it comes to preemptive and predictive healthcare services.

DON'T BUILD WHAT'S ALREADY BEEN BUILT

With hundreds of bespoke A.I. projects underway, the government is building software when it needs to, but the principle is not to duplicate what vendors already offer.

This means accepting the use of A.I.s outside Estonia (Ott: “if we're using Microsoft 365, we are already dealing with these kinds of risks”). Instead of discouraging vendor A.I.s, the principle is to conduct a risk assessment for each, then make the results available to citizens. An internal risk register already exists. The next step is making it public.

A.I. EDUCATION FOR FIRST GRADERS

Estonia is pushing education on AI down to first graders. Developing a lasting, relevant A.I. curriculum for 7 year olds is no easy task. I can’t wait to see what Estonia comes up with. Incidentally, the importance of teaching what AI is and isn’t early, as a way of pre-empting unrealistic cultural/Hollywood narratives, comes up elsewhere (see my recent conversation with Beth Singler, “Will We Worship AI?”). How else to maintain critical thinking and sensible use of A.I. across a society?

AI-CURATED LESSONS FOR HIGH-SCHOOLERS

Estonia is working on using A.I. to create tailored lessons to fit the needs of individual high schoolers. The hard part at the moment, Ott says, is finding a way to connect up the AI-based education tools offered by vendors to enable a holistic profile for students, which he considers essential.

Again, in my view, fully-customized lessons for every student, every subject, on-demand, will revolutionize education in schools and universities, ultimately restructuring both. This is absolutely the future.

*Joint Ministry Building, Suur-Ameerika street, Tallinn*

OPEN SOURCE WHERE POSSIBLE

Important for maintainability and interoperability, and for sovereignty: a particular example being the Estonian language corpus, developed and shared with vendors to ensure the Estonian language is properly represented in AI systems.

COLLABORATION BETWEEN GOVERNMENT, ACADEMIA AND BUSINESS

With a population of only 1.37 million, it’s realistically the only way to get everything done. There are a lot of exchanges of personnel between the sectors. A pro bono element also applies: vendors do pro bono work for government which qualifies them for future contracts. 2,700 teams participated in Kaggle competitions to solve government AI challenges when all Ott could offer was a few books and T-shirts for prizes!

ONE LAST THING …

So there it is: a small window into the way Estonia is thinking about A.I. in government, and into the future of government more generally. But before I finish, a broader observation from my time here: the sense of community in Estonia is very noticeable.

Partly, it has to do with being small; people here like to joke that everybody knows everybody. I suspect that it connects even more with their shared sense of precariousness:- with a wary eye on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and repeat violations of Baltic airspace, and still-raw memories of life before Soviet troops pulled out in 1994, the word ‘existential’ comes up a lot. Or maybe it’s simply the shared struggles; ask any Estonian over a certain age and they’ll tell you where they were during the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Way, when two million people held hands in a chain stretching from Tallinn to Vilnius. The Tiger Leap program which famously placed information technology skills at the centre of the economy was born from the collective struggle to breathe life into a post-Soviet economy.

Whatever the origins, the desire to pull together is deeply-ingrained. It explains citizens celebrating a government that experiments and pushes the boundaries of innovation. It explains why businesspeople and academics and citizen programmers can be counted on to roll up sleeves and help. It explains why, if there is a ‘right’ model for A.I. in government, Estonians will surely be first to find it.

GOVERNMENT A.I. IN ESTONIA – WITH OTT VELSBERG