The global conversation on AI governance feat Tallinn Cyber Diplomacy Summer School

As AI makes cyberattacks faster, cheaper and more widely accessible, how can governments keep essential services running and protect public trust? In this episode of the Digital Government Podcast, Merle Maigre, Head of Cybersecurity at the eGA, speaks with Madis Tapupere, former CTO of the Estonian Government and now a tech management consultant, about the white paper National Cyber Resilience in the Age of AI: A Doctrine for Asymmetric Cyber Defence. They explore what a state cannot afford ...

At this year's Tallinn Cyber Diplomacy Summer School, one question kept coming up: how can international cyber agreements move beyond diplomatic language and translate into real action? The question is particularly timely as the United Nations Global Mechanism prepares for its upcoming meeting in New York this July, an important milestone for the permanent UN process on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. In this episode of the Digital Government Podcast, recorded during the Summer Sch...

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 abou...

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 mome...

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...