For Ukraine’s tech-savvy Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the idea of a “digital state” is no longer enough. He is now betting big on artificial intelligence — not just as a tool, but as what he calls an “autonomous agent” shaping governance, education and even the battlefield.

Fedorov, who also serves as minister of digital transformation, is best known for launching Diia, Kyiv’s flagship e-governance app and web portal that lets Ukrainians access documents, pay taxes and use public services. Speaking Saturday at the IT Arena conference — Ukraine’s largest event for tech entrepreneurs, state officials, investors and developers, in the western city of Lviv — he said artificial intelligence is set to redefine how the state itself functions.

“We are working on the concept of the world’s first agentic state,” he said, whereby AI doesn’t just assist but actively makes decisions and delivers services across the government. 

AI-powered services

That transition has already begun. The Diia state platform has embedded machine learning, and an AI assistant now handles more than half of incoming inquiries — work previously done by human operators — helping users find services, guiding them through paperwork, and checking registry data. The assistant can tailor services to personal life events such as childbirth or starting a business.

The ministry’s experiments go further. A “digital twin” bot — trained on Fedorov’s speeches and writings and speaking in his voice, using cloning software from Polish startup ElevenLabs — is live on Telegram and coming soon to WhatsApp. The bot is mainly designed to review resumes and proposals for digitizing public services that are submitted to the ministry. But Ukrainians can also ask it questions — some as basic as “What books can you recommend?” — share ideas or file complaints to Fedorov. 

“This AI model has watched all my interviews and read all my columns — it knows more about me than I do,” Fedorov said.

Dmytro Ovcharenko, technical director of the ministry’s AI department, told Recorded Future News that Ukraine faces particular challenges in training its systems: the lack of established methods to test AI in the Ukrainian language, especially given local quirks like the use of Surzhyk, a Ukrainian-Russian linguistic blend.

Behind the scenes, the ministry has introduced AI into its legal department and recruitment processes. And on the front lines, Ukrainian forces are already using machine learning to analyze battlefield data and increase the autonomy of drones.

To support this expansion, the ministry is building infrastructure to host and localize an open-source large language model on Ukrainian servers. Once operational, the system would provide free access to government agencies, private companies and other institutions. Fedorov said the ministry has begun constructing the backbone for this effort with support from U.S. chipmaker NVIDIA.

AI under fire

Scaling AI nationwide comes with risks, however. Speaking with Recorded Future News, Fedorov acknowledged that Ukraine has already delayed some projects after red-team tests exposed vulnerabilities in its AI systems.

Ukraine previously built a security center within the Diia team, running bug bounties, red-team drills and open-sourcing the code. With AI, Fedorov said, they “went even further,” appointing a deputy minister dedicated to cybersecurity and cloud — a former senior executive from one of Ukraine’s largest IT companies.

“We made security its own vertical and built a new management model so that everything we launch can be independently tested,” he said.

The ministry has also begun deploying tools to monitor potential AI-powered attacks against its own staff.

Among the main threats to AI models, according to Fedorov, are prompt attacks — attempts to trick a system into ignoring its instructions, leaking sensitive data, or generating harmful or unintended outputs.

“This is something new,” he said. “And we are probably the first government in the world to face it.”