1. General

Category

Category

Other

Please describe Other

The solution can be addressed to multiple industries.

2. Project Details

Company or Institution

Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of the Republic of Estonia

Project

KrattAI

General description of the AI solution

KrattAI is the vision of how digital public services should work in the age of Artificial Intelligence. KrattAI will be an interoperable network of AI applications, which enable citizens to use public services with Virtual Assistants through text- and voice-based interaction and as a result, achieve the best e-government experience.

Website

https://en.kratid.ee/burokratt

Organisation

Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of the Republic of Estonia

3. Aspects

Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.

Kratt AI team is working on not just a Virtual Assistant as such, but a concept that will connect the public and private sector services, providing both – customer and informational services. The virtual assistants (IVA/IPA) are not as innovative anymore – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon did a great job on developing those. Kratt AI concept is different because of the scale – we simply don't have limits. We are starting from automating the Public Sector (Government) services and that through textual and conversational robots and we are searching for opportunities to scale up in the private sector and on a worldwide level (providing cross-border solutions). What is important is that the solution is not just a collection of chatbots, but an interoperable network of AI systems that will ease access to services and data for all the users, first of all in Estonia, and then – worldwide.

The detailed analysis for Kratt AI was done in the year 2020. During the analysis was defined the opportunity, needs, value and were created the prototype (Proof of Concept) which was successfully tested and shown great feasibility. Starting from the beginning of 2021 the preparation for further development was done and now we are starting with the development of MVP in July-August 2021. The MVP ETA is December 2021.

Status of technology: TRL6, all the aspects regarding KrattAI are fully transparent – starting from business strategy and roadmap to the technology side: architecture, technical solutions – which is Open Source and available for all the users.

Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.

KrattAI's first version will be launched in three authorities in Estonia: Police and Border Guard Board, Consumer Protection and TEchnical Regulatory Authority, National Library of Estonia. This potentially leads us to the whole population of Estonia (apx 1.325 million). In the year 2021, we will proceed with further development and implement KrattAI in 10 more agencies/authorities.

Today we are searching for international/cross-border collaboration possibilities. For example, Finland is working on their concept – Aurora AI, which is similar to the KrattAI initiative, and we do see a huge potential in the provisioning of cross-border services. As it was stated before – this, in turn, means, that there are no theoretical limits for scaling up, only technical and strategic issues are the ones which we do face while negotiating with partners worldwide, i.e. some countries do not have a specific strategy regarding the Governmental AI development, others have plans, but they are in too early stage.

Talking about Sustainable Development Goals and how much solution replies to overall objectives: since the main idea of KrattAI is interoperability between different services/data and intertwining of the service providers and this in order to ease the access to services and data for all the citizens worldwide – then it would be right to state that KrattAI scope spreads on a various SDG's, supporting the general call to ensure that by 2030 all people will enjoy peace and prosperity.

Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.

KrattAI Proof of Concept is basically the first MVP that is usable "out of the box" and which is taken as a foundation and will be continuously developed further/upgraded by optimizing the solution, adding the key features, and connecting more and more services.

From a technical perspective, the solution is open source and easily scalable. Some of the problems which we are facing in terms of scaling up were mentioned before – readiness of partners to cooperate and integrate because of different TRL or even because of missing strategy. The COVID-19 affects the negotiation process since the majority of partners are concentrated on problems that happened because of pandemic (by the way, KrattAI could be very helpful in such a situation, providing easy access to all the relevant information and consolidating the data from healthcare organizations, Government and other agencies).

Talking about the emergence and growth of companies developing applications based on AI – we do believe that the KrattAI concept can potentially be the "icebreaker" in AI applications development. All the pieces being developed are open source and we do not just publish them, but promote them for Governments and Businesses to use, develop/upgrade, etc. In Estonia, we have involved multiple Businesses in the process: presenting the business and technical solutions in order to double-check the rightness of our path with experts in their fields.

Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.

The KrattAI MVP is meant for all the users in Estonia providing easy access to Governmental services and information regardless of nationality, gender, and providing equal opportunity for all the citizens.

The KrattAI future is going far abroad and the main idea is the same – our main goal is to provide public services in a most efficient way and regardless of any aspect – all the users are equal and there is no such algorithm that could possibly discriminate user.

The solution is lawful, replies to all the EU regulations. Ethical principles and values are very important for us – relevant language technologists and other experts are involved in order to ensure the quality. Solution architecture is strict and well defined, ensuring the robustness of the solution. We are developing using the TDD (Test Driven Development) process, which ensures the "all in place" aspect and leaves near-zero percent for errors/fails.