Ukraine’s Diia App Powers a New ‘Agentic State’ (Full Transcript)

[00:00:03] Speaker 1: Welcome, Danilo, and thanks for coming all the way from Ukraine to join us on stage today. To start off, I'd love to learn a little bit more about the mission of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the goals you aim to achieve.

[00:00:18] Speaker 2: Okay, thank you. Hello, everyone. Hello, Oswin. First of all, thank you for the invitation, and we are proud to be here and so excited, and we truly believe that we are creating the government of future, creating it together. And just a quick note about our ministry. Six years ago, our president set the goal that we need to create a digital state. And actually, we did it. And from that time, if you're talking about the ranking of the quality of delivering the public services, Ukraine risen from 102nd position to 5th position, so it's our result for the sixth year. But from that time, our mission has evolved, and now we are talking about moving from digital state to the agentic state. And that is how our mission sounds.

[00:01:27] Speaker 1: That's fascinating. And I think one thing that really struck me when we visited you last November is that both the digital state and the agentic state, they're not necessarily the end goal, but really how your mission also really involves making the most convenient state, which brings the citizen at the core. And I'd love to have your vision of how you see the everyday life of Ukrainians change thanks to what you're building.

[00:01:53] Speaker 2: Yeah, first of all, you know, if you're talking about the agentic state, we understand as a tech guy what we mean when we're talking about the agentic state. First of all, it's about the user experience that as government, we want to bring to the citizens, the values that we want to deliver. And we believe that now we want to build the state which will be like a proactive, which anticipates the needs of our citizens, which engage with our citizens in simpler way. And it's about the services that people can order by the single request. So it's about the convenience, first of all. And it's about new kind of paradigm, a new kind of user experience that we want to bring to our citizens by delivering the services. That's what we are doing now. And the agentic state is the answer on the architecture level, how we want to do this.

[00:03:02] Speaker 1: Amazing. And for us, partnering with you is really amazing. And we work on a bunch of very interesting projects. But maybe the main one is the DIA. DIA is the national super app of Ukraine that allows citizens to process a lot of different tasks with the government. So again, in that mission of that convenient state. I know, you know, you have dozens of services there, like getting married. And I just found out backstage that you're launching a new service on Valentine's Day, which is divorce. Yes. It's very timely. That's true.

[00:03:42] Speaker 2: Maybe after Valentine's Day, maybe not on this day.

[00:03:47] Speaker 1: This is part of anticipating the need of the citizen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:03:51] Speaker 2: We will think about that. Okay.

[00:03:54] Speaker 1: But maybe more broadly, tell us about DIA. And how it fits into your mission.

[00:04:00] Speaker 2: Yeah. First of all, DIA is our flagman product. What is DIA, actually? It's Ukrainian super app. And actually, each citizen in Ukraine can order different kind of services through DIA. So it's about 20 hundred plus services, different services. Yeah. You're right. We have the services of online marriage now. Yeah. You can register your business by 10 minutes through the DIA. So it's app which make engagement with the state simpler. What actually we are doing now, we understand that we are moving to the agentic state. And we have two interfaces. We have web portal interfaces. And we have mobile app application, actually. And if you're talking about the mobile portal application, we built the first world AI assistant. Which is agentic based. And what does it mean? It means that you can order a service by the one request. You just need, for example, say, I need a certificate of income. And after that, you will get the certificate of income on your mail. So it's easy to get the service. So that is how it works. And you know, during the time since the implementation of AI in web portal, we actually have about 200,000 conversations. And actually 6,000 certificates was ordered. And it means that it's a new way in which people can order the services. And that is a proof of that. And now we are working to implement AI on mobile application. It means that we deliver services to 23 plus million citizens. And we will do this, I think, during the next several months. So I can talk a lot about the idea. Because it's our flagman product. But I think it's better to show a quick demo. About what actually the idea is.

[00:06:50] Speaker 3: Hey. Hello. How can I help you with government services today?

[00:06:56] Speaker 4: Yeah. So I have a problem in my building. My elevator is constantly turned off because of the outages. Can you help me with that?

[00:07:07] Speaker 3: I'll help you with information about elevator outages in buildings. Let me check what resources are available for this issue. I found information about a government program that can help with your elevator outage problem. The program provides financial assistance for apartment buildings to purchase generators and energy equipment like batteries and solar panels. Which would provide backup power during outages. I've sent you a link with details about how to apply for this help.

[00:07:34] Speaker 4: Great. And while we're here, can you please order the income certificate of the quarter that was before the previous one?

[00:07:45] Speaker 3: Your income certificate for Q3 2025 has been successfully ordered. You'll receive an email notification when it's ready. And I've sent you a link to download it from your personal cabinet.

[00:08:02] Speaker 1: Amazing.

[00:08:04] Speaker 2: And what's this video about? It's our pilot. And we implement 11Labs functionality in our web platform portal. And I think also during the next month, we will implement voice interaction in our web portal. And after that, we bring it to the mobile application. So I think it was a first showcase when we show to the public audience how it will work.

[00:08:39] Speaker 1: It's fantastic. I love it. And of course, we believe that voice is the most natural interface to interact with technology. But also the most accessible, which are important elements for a government to think about. So I'm curious how you're thinking about the voice interface more broadly in the public sector. Yes, we...

[00:09:01] Speaker 2: First of all, we think that the voice interaction is more empathic, you know. And it brings to citizens human-oriented engagement. And that's why for us... That's why for us it's very important to bring these capabilities to our citizens. Because we truly believe that it's that kind of user experience that make interaction simpler. And also, it's not only one case. Like the AI application. We have also several projects in which we want to include voice, actually. And now we are working on implementing voice in our support team engagement. It means we have a lot of requests in governments. We understand that we don't have... Sometimes we have the lack of capacity to actually work with all these requests. And this is difficult to cover all of these requests. And that's why the implementing of voice in our hotline is really efficient tools and really efficient opportunity how to optimize this process. So we also have some showcase. Let's look. Amazing.

[00:10:40] Speaker 5: Hello, good afternoon.

[00:10:45] Speaker 6: Could you tell me please, I have Starlink and I heard in the news that it needs to be verified. How to do it and where should I go?

[00:11:00] Speaker 5: Now I will check the information about the verification of Starlink and where you need to go. Please wait a few seconds. To verify the Starlink terminal, you need to register serial numbers, keyed number from the box, UTID for setting up an account or a relationship, as well as a registration number on the Starlink portal. Next, prepare a passport and a card of the taxpayer. With these documents, contact the nearest center for administrative services, SNAP, and submit an application to the administrator. Verification is free and fast. Thank you very much for your help. Goodbye.

[00:11:36] Speaker 6: You are welcome.

[00:11:42] Speaker 5: Glad to help. If you have any other questions, please contact us.

[00:11:50] Speaker 1: Amazing. This type of citizen support via VariaVoice is really one of the core pillars that we see of our government work and talking more broadly about our work with government and government and actually also large enterprise adoption and deployment of AI is something we see on a day-to-day basis and something that really shines in our partnership and it's very unique is how the Ministry of Digital Transformation is so fast at iterating, experimenting, but actually also that phase of bringing it into production. One anecdote when we were in November, me and my colleague Pierre, we went to some technical meetings with your engineers and usually how this goes is that we end up talking a bit of theory, architecture, and so on, and we arrived and your engineers had already built out full integrations with our systems, MVPs of the agents, and we could really dive deep and that kind of hands-on approach. I think some other things that really stand out is how you collaborate with the private sector and you kind of focus really on solving problems. One unique thing as well is how you're embedded in the other ministries, so you have your digital ministers in all the other ministries, so you're very close to the problem but also very close to the technology and the building, so I'd love for you to share a little bit more the learnings and the internal capabilities that you think governments need for safe but also timely deployment of AI to solve citizen problems.

[00:13:21] Speaker 2: Yeah, first of all, I want to say that I think everybody knows that we have the war in Ukraine and the highest risk for us is don't take any risk in that time, so we have the political will to move in AI direction. We understand that it's not only technology about optimization or development, it's also technology for our surveillance, and that's why we have the fastest delivery of AI cases, so we don't need a month, we just need a few weeks to deliver something to the production environment, so that's how it works now in Ukraine. And if we're talking about the capabilities, I know that there are a lot of conversation about AI sovereignty, and you know, AI sovereignty from our perspective, it's not only about the local infrastructure. For us, it's a hybrid approach of local infrastructure and cloud opportunities, so our main message is that we can use both approach in government, so we need to understand in which cases we can use cloud approach, or we can use local infrastructure, it depends on different factors like sensitive data, that type of cases, but our strong message is that we truly believe, and like an example of our partnership, our collaboration, that the cloud services can be used in government, and that's actually what we are doing now. So I want to thank the 11 Labs for your support, for this collaboration, we truly believe that we are now in the progress of creating the government of future, and we will do a lot of really great things, and bring a lot of value to the citizens, and that's just the beginning. That's all.

[00:15:52] Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Danilo, that's all we have time for today, but I say thanks to you, it's amazing to be part of your journey, and I really look forward to everything we have to build together. Thank you.