Building the agentic state: Ukraine’s model in practice

This article contributes to the Friends of Europe’s Peace, Security and Defence programme and Ukraine Initiative. Its insights feed into the Jacques Delors Friends of Europe Foundation’s broader Spending Better initiative, which seeks to optimise defence spending, strengthen European institutions and capabilities, and enhance Europe-wide preparedness and societal resilience.

In a recent piece for Friends of Europe, I reflected on a conversation with Luukas Ilves, Estonia’s former Chief Information Officer. He suggested that countries with the most advanced digital governments may now be the least prepared for what comes next, precisely because their success can make further change more difficult. The article raised a question I wanted to pursue further: what does the transition to agentic AI look like from inside a government that has been continuously rebuilding itself for six years? Oleksandr Bornyakov, Acting Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, offered a concrete answer in a conversation for the FORWARD podcast, pointing to a programme that is already taking shape.

Bornyakov describes the next stage of Ukrainian digital government as the “agentic state”: a model in which citizens express their needs in voice or text and receive outcomes without having to navigate bureaucratic complexity or understand institutional structures. Ukraine’s Diia app, used by 24 million Ukrainians, is already the entry point to this transition. Its next iteration, Diia AI, is being developed as a government-focused chat interface designed to deliver services rather than simply provide information. Ukraine has already launched its first AI-driven service, where citizens receive a tax income report simply by requesting it through a prompt, and the broader vision is a single interface through which any government service can be accessed and completed entirely in conversation.

The approach underpinning this shift starts with one principle: build a proof of concept first, formalise the strategy only after the concept has demonstrated its value. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation began experimenting with AI before large language models entered the mainstream, and when ChatGPT arrived the response was practical rather than declarative. “Before we go full AI, let’s take the technologies we have from partners and try to build something that customers will consider useful,” he said. In this model, the strategy is not the starting point, but rather followed only after the proof of concept confirmed that the approach worked.

The infrastructure needed to make the agentic state viable is already in place. With 24 million users, virtually every adult Ukrainian is already accustomed to interacting with the state through the Diia app. This level of adoption allows Ukraine to deploy new services into an existing habit rather than building one from scratch.

Ukraine is also developing its own large language model, Siaivo, optimised for the Ukrainian language and built with security considerations in mind. Alongside this, an ‘AI factory’ is being established to provide sovereign computing capacity to government authorities. The project involves partners such as NVIDIA and HP, with implementation led by Ukrainian engineers and domestic companies. For Bornyakov, technological sovereignty is not about isolation, but about securing access to critical capabilities through open partnerships. History, he argues, shows that closed ecosystems lose out to open ones.

The same logic of openness shapes Diia City and Diia City Invest, the legal and financial infrastructure Ukraine has built for international investors and technology companies. Until Diia City was introduced in 2021 and launched in 2022,there was no straightforward legal framework for incorporating international businesses and no fund structure that matched the language of global venture capital. It addressed the first gap by creating a transparent legal environment for technology companies, with around 4,000 companies now incorporated and approximately 150,000 people employed within the ecosystem. Diia City Invest addresses the second, building a fund registration framework modelled on the structures investors already use in the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel. The underlying principle, as Bornyakov puts it, is simplicity and clarity: “If you want real investment, you must create the conditions where it is so undoubtedly clear that I can create a company in 15 minutes, nobody can come, everything is plain and simple.”

The long-term vision for sustainability also builds on this approach: digital transformation should be cash–positive, with business-friendly paid services that companies find valuable enough to fund on a recurring basis, creating a revenue stream that makes the ministry’s development independent from external programmes. In the medium term, the ministry is already moving towards co-investment models where private businesses help fund projects from which they directly benefit, building a more durable foundation than grant-based cooperation.

Ukraine’s digital government has been shaped by continuous reinvention, and the capacity that process has generated is now the foundation for something more ambitious. The agentic state is already a programme in motion – and the results will be worth watching closely.

This article draws on insights from “FORWARD with Valeriya Ionan”, a podcast for decision-makers and builders. The full conversation with Aleksandr Bornyakov, Acting Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, that informed this article is available here. The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.