The last time Ott Velsberg appeared on this podcast was early 2022. Popular LLMs had not yet been released. The conversation was about how AI could support data-driven decision-making in government – a topic that felt, at the time, more prospective than operational.

Four years on, with Estonia counting over 220 public sector AI use cases and close to 60 million euros in estimated annual impact, the frame has shifted. So, it is now less about what AI in government could look like and more about what it has taken to get there.

In this episode of the Digital Government Podcast, Ott Velsberg, outgoing Chief Data Officer of the Estonian government and responsible for Estonia's AI policy, tells us about the path from strategy to working infrastructure. And the long institutional work that makes it possible to coexist with both consent-based data sharing and AI adoption at scale.

When governments across Europe try to modernise, the challenge is rarely that they lack ambition or resources. More often, what is missing is the space to think carefully before acting – to understand what the actual problem is, what has already been tried elsewhere, and who inside the administration will need to carry the change forward.

The European Union’s Technical Support Instrument (TSI) was built around exactly that gap: not funding, but structured expert support, delivered at the moment when a reform is still being designed.

In this episode of the Digital Government Podcast, recorded around Europe Day, we speak with Florian Hauser, Deputy Head of Unit for Public Administration at SG REFORM – the European Commission’s Task Force for reforms and investment – and with Hannes Astok, Executive Director of the e-Governance Academy (eGA), which has been working closely with the TSI across a growing portfolio of themes in recent years.

Explore the European Union’s approach to reform support and what it actually takes to make them work. Tune in!

Thirty years ago, Estonia launched Tiger Leap, a programme that put computers and internet in every school and, in many ways, laid the groundwork for a digital society what we have known to call e-Estonia. Today, the country is attempting something just as ambitious with artificial intelligence (AI) in education. But the conditions are different this time.

When Tiger Leap started in 1996, neither the schools nor the students had the technology – everybody had to learn together. Now, the asymmetry runs the other way: the students have leaped, while the education system is catching up.

In this episode of the Digital Government Podcast, Ivo Visak, CEO of AI Leap (TI-Hüpe), the national programme integrating artificial intelligence into Estonian high schools, Visak makes the case for why treating AI in schools as an intervention rather than an experiment is the only responsible path forward.

Tune in to explore the Estonian path in implementing AI in education!