“We are happy to offer a nation-scale testbed for your solutions, a flexible legal environment and powerful tech ecosystem to tap into,” the Prime Minister said. “Together, we can be pathfinders on building the next stages of digital society.”
“New, more efficient, and more convenient services can be created with the help of artificial intelligence, such as self-driving vehicles, which could, for example, help people with mobility disabilities or special needs to participate in social life. People spending hours in traffic every day could save valuable time. New markets and opportunities would be open to entrepreneurs,” he added.
Prime Minister Ratas invited all the enterpreneurs from abroad to join Estonia’s new digital nation using e-Residency that enables users to run a company in the European Union from a distance and digitally sign documents. “Already today, each week we receive more e-Residents than there are babies born in Estonia – hence, we grow faster in digital space as an economy and country,” the Prime Minister said.
Ratas also spoke about the future of Estonia’s other state e-services, saying that a variety of new, proactive services is currently being built. “This is the next step of a hassle-free government where services are truly seamless,” he added.
According to Ratas, one of the biggest news from the business perspective is the launch of a new service bundle called “Reporting 3.0” in 2018, which will give small and medium-size enterprises an opportunity to get rid of their tax accountants as declaring taxes becomes fully automatic.
Ratas stressed that one of the key elements of Estonia’s digital success story is transparency. “Technology can help to build trust,” he pointed out. “For example, the log files of key Estonian governmental information systems have been backed up in blockchain since 2012. Looking from the user side, every citizen can detect who has been looking at their data – we have built such features into services, like electronic health record. Transparency opens up a world with less corruption and more trust.”
