Luukas Ilves is Government Chief Information Officer of Government of Estonia from January 2022. Before joining the Ministry of Economics and Communications of Estonia, Luukas was a Head of Strategy at Guardtime, where he lead Guardtime’s work with governments, international organisations and NGOs. He focused on solving tricky challenges and areas of strategic importance, such as digital sovereignty and cloud adoption, trustworthy AI, and the response to COVID-19. He has chaired the Council of Europe’s expert committee on the human rights and ethical dimensions of Artificial Intelligence and is a member of the advisory councils of Stanford University’s Libraries and the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based thinktank. He is founder of the Tech Green Pledge, a network of tech companies committed to combatting climate change. Luukas has served in various positions for the Government of Estonia and the European Commission, including leading digital policy during Estonia’s 2017 Presidency of the EU Council, as a member of staff for European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes and as Head of International Affairs for RIA, Estonia’s e-government and cybersecurity agency. Luukas is a graduate of Stanford University, a reserve officer and a member of the Estonian Defence League’s Cyber Defence Unit. He has been decorated by the President of Estonia with the Order of the White Star, one of the youngest recipients in the history of the award.
Mike Bracken and Luukas Ilves will discuss the challenges faced by advanced digital governments, including the need to connect technology to service delivery, to reflect the dynamic culture of the internet economy in government, to tackle the cost of legacy and take advantage of new business models (foremost among them cloud), all while staying within budgets and striving toward cybersecurity.
The panel that concludes this year's conference will take a look at the AI landscape from the needs and possibilities of national and global regulatory frameworks for AI, and other emerging digital technologies. As the drivers of these technologies are not the governments but private companies, specifically a few of them that further concentrate such competences, the national agendas on accepting or rejecting the private companies' utilization of AI on cross-boarder services needs to be subject of careful consideration for governments. At the same time, digital services provided by governments may use number of the AI applications for better service design, including, but not limited to, the aspects of empowering citizens and e-democracy.