Building a digital society
Petra Holm, digital transformation adviser at the e-Estonia Briefing Centre, outlines the steps Estonia has taken to digitalise society.
Petra Holm says Estonia has digitalised all state-provided services and the country is now moving into a “post-digital” era. She asserts that “digitalisation is a journey with no final destination”.
Holm describes private-public partnerships as “absolutely instrumental” in Estonia’s digitalisation journey. Although citizens are not mandated to use digital services, Holm indicates that many choose to do so. She says this is mainly because “they are easier, they are cheaper”.
Digital literacy
Holm explains that Estonia’s digitalisation would not have been possible without banks. In 2002, Estonia’s banks took on board the state-issued digital identity and greatly increased its use by encouraging service users to use it to log in. This led to the public developing a habit for using digital services. She says Estonia did not have this habit “as a post-Soviet country”, and that it had “zero digital literacy in 1991”.
To address the digital illiteracy, the Tiger Leap programme was launched in 1996. It was aimed at computerising schools and connecting them to the internet. This led to all schools being computerised by 2001.
To improve adults’ digital literacy, the Look@World initiative was introduced in the late-1990s. This initiative is ongoing and provides free computer courses to citizens.
Contrasting Estonia’s previous level of digitalisation and now, Holm says: “Tax declarations used to be something that Estonians hated. Now we compete in how quickly we declare taxes. It takes three minutes.”
Holm explains that Estonia spent a decade preparing for the provision of digital services. As part of this, all decentralised databases storing citizens’ data were connected using the x-Road.
The x-Road is an interoperability platform which enables automatic transfer of end-to-end encrypted data between databases. Holm says this enables the provision of services “at a fraction of a second”.
Online voting has been optional for Estonians since 2005. The country also set up the Citizen Initiative Portal which enables citizens to vote on other petitions. If 1,000 votes are collected, the petition is passed on to the Estonian Parliament.
“The population was never against digitalisation. We saw it as a path to freedom, so the population embraced digital technologies.”
Future focus
Estonia is now focused on cyber hygiene as it takes the next step on its digitalisation journey. Holm explains that Russia continuously bombards Estonia with cyber-attacks. She says the number of attacks has “escalated dramatically” in recent years. Holm mainly attributes this to AI learning to speak Estonian, adding that the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have also had an impact.
In 2025, there were around 10,500 cyber incidents, with 59 data leaks arising from this. Although it is not the perfection Estonians seek, Holm says the country does not experience many failures with digital government. This has built trust amongst the public.
Holm says citizens want digital services to become more automated, and that Estonia is launching many AI initiatives, the most prominent of which is AI Leap. This is an educational initiative which seeks to address “the elephant in the room where children are already substituting their brains” with AI.
AI Leap, which went live in January 2026, assists students as a tutor would. Using the Estonian educational curriculum, it asks students questions to guide them to the answer for their question, rather than simply providing the answer. Holm says it is vital that today’s students are educated appropriately as Estonia has an ageing population which is decreasing.
“Every Estonian is super important. We invest into people because they are our most precious resource,” she says.
Holm states that Estonia’s digitalisation and the ease with which business can be done there has led to the advent of e-residencies. On top of Estonia’s population of 1.37 million, there are around 142,000 e-residents.
These are people that use Estonia’s digital infrastructure to remotely establish and operate companies; paying taxes and creating jobs in the country.
“We cannot increase our population naturally, so we thought of creative ways to address the shrinking tax base and e-residency was one of those,” says Holm.
Additionally, the digital expert says there is dissatisfaction with the length of time companies and entrepreneurs spend submitting reports. She says: “They could be fully automated, if only we could convince our entrepreneurs to switch to e-invoices.”
While the wider public trusts the Government, entrepreneurs are more cautious. Holm says companies must be persuaded to trust digital services so taxes and reports can be fully automated, freeing them up to focus on making money.
Concluding, she states that Estonia has a target to bring the level of satisfaction with digital services up to 90 per cent by 2030. Holm says: “We have to redesign the way we provide services.
“It will take a massive effort that will require ministries, entities, and institution collaborating. Although we have been doing it for decades, it is a big challenge.”
