Simone Maria Parazzoli about the Agentic State and how algorithms can transform governments
Simone Maria Parazzoli is part of the Agentic State project and previously worked for the OECD and the ISI Foundation. His experience on the digital transformation of governments gives interesting insights. In this episode we talked about the Agentic State, an attempt to use technologies, especially AI, to provide governments with better services and faster decisions.
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Transcript
Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast, and our guest of today is Simone Maria Parazzali. Hi. Thank you for your time, Simone. And, yeah, I mean, I know that, you have been researching about, civic tech, gov tech, governance solution that use, also, I mean, governance solution, related to the to the digital era we are living in. And, I know that, you were researching with the OECD. And, would you like to tell us what you have learned in, doing your research?
Yeah. Sure. I mean, a little bit of background about me. Over the last couple of years, I was indeed at the OECD where my work was on two fronts. Actually, three. The first one was innovation in public services. The second one was about, innovative participation and how emerging technologies can improve civic participation. And the third one was on AI in the public sector. And after those years at the OECD, I'm now part of a new initiative that is in part funded by World Bank, that is called the agentic state, and the goal of the initiative is to actually, envision and then lay the foundations for governments to adopt agentic AI solutions. And, yeah, there's a bunch of things that I have learned or that caught my attention and interest over the last years. But indeed, the big red line across all was always this tension between technology, specifically AI, and government, which also includes, let's say, the the governance aspect of these technologies and these technologies when deployed in these complex systems, which are partly social, partly political, partly technical that are indeed the the use cases of technology and AI in particular in government.
And, how did you start? Like, I mean, AI now is a thing, and so I I'm thinking that a lot of people maybe are thinking about it how it can influence the social and political life, but how it was for you, like, when you had, like, the idea AI is going to change governance.
I mean, everything started in terms of my curiosity for the topic when I was a student at Sciences Po. And I I I was lucky to have as one of my teachers, Swazik Penikov, who is an independent researcher and journalist working on algorithms in the public sector. And she she run this little course about algorithms in the in the public sector and how actually deployments could be done in a better way and going through some of the most famous, scandals around the adoption of algorithms in the public sector. And then I ended up falling in love with the topic because it was presenting many sets of questions that had no simple answer at all. And we had some more technical questions to untangle about precisely what does it mean when an algorithm is discriminating. For instance, the the famous compass example of the adoption of algorithms in the judicial system in The US. There was then a a ProPublica, article that was judging, let's say, the adoption of the algorithm as discriminatory. And then there has been an endless discussion about the technical details of how actually you can measure discrimination and to what extent an algorithm can satisfy different, definitions of fairness, which is in practice, a very interesting normative question, but at the same time, a very practical and tangible question. Because in practice, it means that some people then will be put to jail or receive different conditions, different treatments by the judicial sector in that case. And, yeah, fundamentally the thing was in this field, there's a bunch of questions that I have no answer to, and this is something that I find very interesting. And then I kept just working on this topic, so I I did my master thesis on AI and public sector trying to understand specifically how algorithmic accountability can be ensured through policy. And so the idea is that governments have a big pallet of options, and they can pick different choices, but each policy will have an impact on on the social technical system that is the the the use case. So the really the the complex system of technology and institutions and humans, acting together to deploy an algorithm in the public sector. And so among these many possible colors on the palette of policymakers, among these different policies, the question is what should governments do? And, I mean, just like most research, I wasn't coming there with an answer, but I was just offering trying to offer a framework to to think through this matter. And then, yeah, I just stick to the topic. So I went for a while to do data science research. And, and, again, it was NLP for governments and then OECD and then now World Bank. But, yeah, the fundamentally, I think what is still extremely interesting to me is that there's really no answer to most of the things. And even the most basic ones, even when we start thinking about the deployment of very simple algorithms in the public sector, we immediately encounter problems, related to the governance, related to, the data management and sharing, and obviously privacy issues, and cultural issues related to, let's say the the the tension between deterministic and probabilistic approaches in the public sector, all questions that really do not have an answer.
And, indeed, I have a lot of questions that, we cannot have, an easy answer. And, you mentioned policies and also in the agentic state, paper, there was, something about policies, how AI agent can help in maybe drafting policies in, finding how the policies have to change. And, it's very interesting how they can, also maybe change in almost real time Yeah. Based on the data.
Yeah. Indeed. Let's say, the agentic state report is a vision paper. And in this vision paper, it's really a serious science fiction attempt to describe how governments could look like when AI agents are diffused. To describe, somewhat rigorously the this science fiction future, we developed this framework that has 12 layers. And one of the layers is indeed, policy making and rule making. When it comes to to this layer, we claim that agentic policy making and rule making will show four characteristics. And the first one is, dynamic policy simulation. So in practice, it's AI agents that stress test policies in digital twins of society. And the idea is that through this simulation, they can actually, explore how different outcomes can be achieved through different set of laws, so combination of laws. The second feature of agentic policymaking is machine readable law. So it's as simple as having regulation that are not ambiguous text, but precise and execute executable code, and which will enable the consistent application, of of law, but also, let's say, the automated compliance against law. The third feature of agentic policymaking is adaptive rule refinement, which is precisely what you were referring to saying real time. So rules instead of being, let's say, freeze, in time, they are actually continuously monitored, in terms of the impact they have. And through evidence based analysis, they are adjusted to optimize for the outcomes that are identified by policy makers. And the fourth point, which is probably what's more interesting for the civic tech community is participatory intelligence. So the idea that, you can actually, through the use of agents, have more and better quality feedback from citizens, business, and frontline systems. And the data points they continuously provide, can actually be used and leveraged to develop better policies and better regulations. And so in real time, you can actually learn from the experience of regulation to improve wide in the in the best possible way, try to preserve democratic accountability.
These things about testing the policies made me think about, how in some way, this is, maybe replicating, like, what big, I mean, tech companies are doing. So when, there is a change in their software, they don't release the software to everyone, but just, I don't know, a small percentage of people. They see if the changes actually, it doesn't have bugs, all these kind of things, and then they release it. And, also, like, the machine readable law, it makes me think about code is low. Yeah. That maybe it's yeah, I mean
No. It's it's it's precisely, let's say, on the two points. The first one being simulation size process that is not far from, for instance, AB testing that is that is common practice in in private companies. Indeed, that's true. And also at the same time, in private companies, you see continuous efforts on terms and services, for instance. So in that case, it's precisely dynamic changes to regulations which have to take place because of changes in the regulatory context of where a poly product is deployed, but also due to changes in the product itself. So with new, improvements in the offered product, you'd see the necessity of new changes with which are in real time brought to to life. And, second point on machine readable law. Yeah, I think here we have an the interesting and pretty common idea of rules as code, which is something that will probably take a very different look in the future because, I mean, rules as code is definitely not a new concept and it was something that for a long time was considered as a means to decrease the, ambiguity of regulation and to make laws immediately operationalizable. But the truth is that right now we might be able to accept some degree of ambiguity maybe, thanks to Gen AI solutions in the sense that, Chargegbt, for instance, doesn't require you to write perfectly logical sentences. And in the ambiguity of natural language, it can actually work well or well enough. So I think we're gonna see also some somehow a new version, a new updated version of rules as code. And then when it comes to what you were saying, code as low, I think, I mean, here it really depends on what we're thinking about precisely because, the easy question would be what's code and what's law? Like in practice, in the government experience, when we say code is low, what are we thinking about?
I mean, I was thinking about, yeah, the fact that the law can be interpreted, while code, is, let's say, executed. And so if we have laws that cannot be interpreted but can just be executed, as you say, like removing the ambiguity. Yeah.
But I wonder I mean, this is this is, again a big question mark that is interesting. To what extent can an agentic solution be considered deterministic. It really it really depends on the complexity of the agentic solution. And in that case, so going to, a lowest code sorry. A code is low kind of approach doesn't really imply the the fact that there is no ambiguity at all and the code is a 100% deterministic, which raises, I mean, the the interesting question of to what extent can governments accept non deterministic solutions, which is probably the the the fundamental one when we talk about, AI and public sector.
Good good question. I have to think about it. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, it's the it's it's a big one, and we didn't we didn't nail it. So the what my mind always goes towards is that, obviously, there are regulatory mandates to have the administrative administrative practice, for instance, to be explainable and transparent, which means that in practice as a citizen, you are obviously allowed to understand you have the right to understand why your case has been treated in one or the other way. But in the practice of public administration, is this what's going on every day in a sense that are human agents actually at zero level of ambiguity and fully deterministic? Well, that's a cool question to have in mind, and especially when it comes to testing, when we will have the ability to actually test algorithmic and agentic solutions and have a look at their degree of accuracy and recall, we will be able to actually assess how they perform against a human benchmark, which is not a 100% accuracy.
I think that we are bringing back, like, very, very old philosophical questions about if humans being our determinist if they if if we can choose what to do or not. And, yeah, also, old problems that, don't have solution. I mean and, I think about the agentic state. So, basically, a lot of AI agents, a lot of data that the AI agents uses, a lot of connection between different entities. And, I had this flash. Is this the starting of, I mean, the real starting of the civic tech, or is it the end? Because in some way, like, also in the paper, there were some, examples about, how maybe a citizen can, say I don't remember exactly. Maybe I don't know. I I want to open a company. I want to do something. And so the AI agents help that person maybe directing him to the right, entity institution. And so, basically, every question from a citizen, perspective could be satisfied, by the AI agents.
I mean, I think we gotta draw a line between what is GovTech and what is civic tech. And GovTech is generally referred to as the application of technology in government to solve mainly, let's say, efficiency kind of problems, efficiency kind of problems when it comes to the internal machinery of government, procurement processes, internal workflows, database management, and civic tech on the other side, has to do with, let's say, the democratic practice, of governance. And the idea that technology can help have a better dialogue between citizens as democratically represented agents and policymakers, which are their representatives. And and, fundamentally, in civic tech, we have a look at, people not as users of services, but as, again, political actors that actually play in the in the in the game and in the, yeah, in the in the game in the theater of democracy. And so probably the agentic state platform takes more of a gov tech lens towards the adoption of technology in government. But there are indeed some some ideas here and there about civic tech. And, I mean, I I worked in civic tech for a while and especially more than me also Thiago Peisotto, one of the co authors, is one of the brightest thinkers on civic tech. So definitely there is some civic tech thinking underlying the whole vision paper. But I think this this distinction is important and probably what could be interesting to discuss, and I'm also very curious to hear your take on this is to what extent we should make deliberate efforts to blurred line between civic tech and GovTech.
Yeah. That that often, it seems to me that, yeah, they are quite blurred, the distinction between, GovTech and CivicTech because I see the, how maybe everything that is related to, to states, to the government can be defined as GovTech, and at the same time as, I don't know, software for citizen assemblies can be civic tech. At the same time, I wonder if we reach, a state that is so well interconnected, then, can be the outcomes of a citizen assembly also became the input for the, let's say, GovTech part. And so where is GovTech and CivicTech? Then then, of course, this is open a lot of questions because, I I also don't when we talk about the this, possible future, I don't, ever know if we are talking about five years, ten years, twenty, if we will ever see it in our life. I
mean, that's this time time line issue is, is a is a big question mark for for, I mean, the agentic state as as a set of people that are trying to think about this topic. And we don't really know when the agentic state will actually be live, but we don't even know precisely what to what extent we should expect it to be, let's say, implemented in, I don't know, three years or five years. There are a few governments which are running fast towards the agentic state, Ukraine being the leader and one of the only countries that is starting to say out loud that we wanna build the agentic state. Ukraine is definitely the most the most central voice, but also Italy has been doing the first step towards agentic state, Singapore as well, Estonia as well. But the timeline is a big question mark. And in terms of culture of the authors, we are not fully sure that AI 2027 vision will will take place. 2027 is very is very close, and we are not seeing the deployments being precisely adherent to the timeline that was suggested in in that vision.
And also, I wonder, like, so now we have a nation state that are tied, I mean, to to a territory. And, so in the future, if, probably we will see agentic states. And I wonder, like, if everything is very interconnected, also states will become very interconnected. And so I wonder, you know, when, there is the theory about decentralized states, but, also, we can say that, I mean, we are Italians, but at the same time, we use Google. In some way, we are Googley. I don't know how to say. So but if we think about the state as, the entity that has the monopoly of violence, and then the state is not so tied to the territory. Where is the state? I wonder we will see a sort of, let's say, one hundred year sort of global state global agentic state.
Yeah. I have no clue. I think I mean, definitely, let's say that the state has been at least thirty years with Internet that has been trying to to understand this problem of the physicality of the territorial space and and where the the territorial aspects of the Internet actually matter when it comes to, to the monopoly of of violence. What are we imagining for the agentic state is, so far, we are seeking to national state as they are. We are not doing big stretches. We are not imagining, not at all a global a global entity that could be a super partisan, or the dissolution of national states. It's not something that we we are imagining, and there's no real reason to imagine it as of now. Yet there are indeed more and more international collaborative efforts, and this is happening. The the most relevant in example that I have in my mind are the collaborations, that governments did for cloud, but most of all for digital public infrastructure that is an international movement. We could say, helping different governments actually build solutions through the development of common bricks that can help different governments. And this is something that we are thinking about for the agentic state. So the question is to what are the kind of tools and and resources that could be developed at an international level to actually make it easier for governments at the national level to to build their solution. And it's, it's an open question. Actually, if you have any suggestion, I'm more than happy to take it. We have a few ideas, but are not sure precisely of what's gonna what's gonna happen and what's needed.
And, yeah, it was, quite interesting, like, the, a sort of contradiction, because I I'm basically quoting, government government procurement suffer from a fundamental contradiction. Its intentions are impeccable, ensuring fair competition, preventing corruption, max maximizing value for taxpayer, and so on, yet are channeled into bureaucratic processes that undermine the very values they seek to promote. And this also make me think about, conversation with Tiago when, he was, as an example, saying that participatory budgeting is very helpful for, for the political life because citizen are happier. A politician that implements that solution also have more, chance to be reelected. At the same time, then we see that and and also a lot of other advantages. But at the same time, we don't see it often, that met that met methodologies applied, because there are other, I don't know, power dynamics or, like,
Yeah. I mean, there is no civic tech solutions are increasingly diffused, but still very little diffused. They are and many times when they are diffused and adopted, they are done in a way that not necessarily, empowers people. An interesting question is whether actually the the contributions and the final choices of an assembly should be or are not, mandatory for for a municipal council, for instance. There are good reasons to say yes. There are good reasons also to say no because, I mean, they are not elected. And so we can we can take their output as, an informed suggestion. But, yeah, in general, the the low diffusion of civic tech is fundamentally a political problem, and there is no political interest in in having it more diffused. And, indeed, there's the need of movements that do deliberate and explicit efforts to make sure that, governments are accountable and that governments are hearing people's voices. Sometimes this effort need to be And, I mean, most of the time, when these effort are effectively, they are bottom up. And so, I'm thinking about, obviously, Taiwan where relatively quickly. Also, let's say, the top heard the voice and accepted to embed these practices into institutional practices. Same thing goes for decibels, for instance, where there is actually, let's say, support or there has been support from the top, but also at the same time, strong bottom up, push and efforts to ensure that the solution is there, up and active, and deployed successfully in a multitude of use cases.
And, yeah, I have, I have questions, but I also know that, they don't have answer. But I'm thinking, about, like, a democracy as, we know it now and, about, how it can look in the future. So I wonder, like, because sometimes we call different political system with the same name, like, we can use democracy for the one that we have now. I mean, representative democracy. Then the one in the future could be, I don't know, a genetic democracy. And, yeah, how like, you you said before, like, people voices. How can we make sure that people voices are actually heard? So, I I mean, because, I think that some I mean, at least I'm thinking that, it is quite important that citizen, understand that they have a wait.
Mhmm.
Also, because sometimes, you know, the, at the moment, like, politics is, I don't know, wrong for Italy. And so for a normal citizen, it's very far away. Okay. They have the mayor in their town, but also, so how politics can be more accessible and also how to make sure that people feel like they they have some power. Mhmm.
I mean, probably the big underlying question is whether the current representative democracy is working well or not? Big question mark. Very big question mark. But how can we do it better? I think, yeah, I think that technology can help a lot. And it means on on both the gov tech lens and the civic tech lens. And when it comes to the gov tech lens, means listening more to your users, for instance. Making sure that services, perfectly or as much as possible address their needs. And so really being close to their problems and trying to start from the problem to build effective solutions, to improve solutions, and make them evolve with the evolving needs of users. On the civic tech side instead, it means that there is plenty of technologies that can help bring together different voices, detect different opinions. I mean, policy is the easiest example of how you can, let's say, plaster different opinions, and that's the most, let's say, famous one. But, what we're seeing with more advanced technologies is that we can have more sophisticated solutions to define boundaries and identify groups and also facilitate the dialogue between different sets of of participants in that case, different set of citizens. And so I'm quite optimistic on technology as as a means to empower people. Yet both these potential improvements on this GovTech and the civic tech side will require buy in and political support. There's no way a civic tech solution, becomes central in the life of, of a polity without political support, which is not something that should be expected to be received by the king. It's something that can be also fought for through political movements, political effort, and representative democracy itself. But it's, yeah, there there needs to be agreement to make sure that the adoption of technology can actually empower people. There needs to be agreement. There needs to be power behind these technologies.
And related to the adoption of technology, I mean, in the paper, there were several, paragraph related to the cost of inaction. So what if states do not implement technological solution? And, yeah, it seems like they have to because, otherwise, the cost of connection is quite, quite high.
We think so. We think so in a sense that we believe that governments will be better off if they start working on agentic solutions, relatively soon because we expect the world to look quite different in a few months and years. And there's a big opportunity for governments that is to build better services, be more proactive, better address people's needs, and be even more efficient, more effective, more transparent, and regaining some of the trust from people. So there's big opportunity ahead, for governments. The cost of inaction is definitely high, and it will be higher more and more high with time passing by. That's that's for sure. The question probably is, how how will it be how will the cost of inaction be unevenly spread across different countries? So will it be higher for some people not to adopt, AgenTic AI? And I'm thinking about, let's say, the most the more advanced countries and middle and low income countries. How will how will agentic AI and this vision of the agentic state be an opportunity for them, an opportunity of leapfrogging from them as well? And, again, in different in different ways, but we do believe that the cost of inaction is is high and that governments should push and try to experiment right now, try to pilot right now, to collaborate to develop the tools and the resources and the frameworks and the standards, that are needed to make sure that we have the railways to go towards the authentic state.
Yeah. This is about, which kind of resources states have. It's very important. And this maybe was in some way related to the question about, where is the state because, let's say it is, the AI is hosted by, let's say, the big techs. But the the results are chapter about, how state should maybe have a use open source models, maybe hosted in, inside the territory. Yeah. And, there were also some questions about, I mean, should government provide universal baseline agents to ensure equitable access to agentic services, or can market based approaches deliver adequate public benefits? And this is also
a Yeah. Yeah. This, again, is the kind of question that we we put out there as an open question because we have no clue. I mean, we have some ideas, obviously, but not we are not sure. Probably the key concept here is we might be seeing new sources of inequality. If agents are the interface between citizens and governments, different agentic capabilities will determine different possibilities of access to government services and different possibilities of benefiting from them. Obviously, this is unacceptable, and this is something that we should fight against. The question here is how to avoid it. Will government be in the position to, let's say, provide a successful and satisfactory and trustworthy solution for everyone or and then allow some people to, benefit from private solutions. That's maybe a possibility. Or maybe we want government to lay the foundations, lay, let's say, the the railways for then private sector actors to build on. And so it could be that governments deploys, let's say, develops the digital public infrastructure. So the the the the railways for payments, for identity, for data interoperability and management. And then we have private actors building on top of them, and we have economic incentives to make sure that the the output of private private actors is actually ensuring equitable access to all public services. Again, we don't really know. We are here to explore. What's sure is that right now there is plenty of private vendors which are reaching out to governments saying, actually, you should do this, you should do that, and we have a solution for this, we have a solution for that, which is exciting. But the practicality of government experience today is that they don't know precisely what they need in terms of agentic solutions, and they don't have the means to understand precisely how this agentic solution could be deployed in practice, which is why we are seeing our initiative as important because we we are trying to close this gap and make sure that governments are empowered to take bold decision, towards the Atlantic state.
And I was curious about the the feedbacks that I mean, many, I saw from the names there were, many institutions, many, people that are, I don't know, like, are working on digital innovation inside The States. And, yeah, what was the feedback or, like,
I mean, the the actors, the contributors to the paper are contributing in their personal capacity. So they are not, through their participation, we are not taking an official endorsement from their agencies. But what's exciting is that these people are the leading thinkers and the leading doers in the field of government technology, across the globe. And the simple fact of having them engaged in the process is amazing and it's a signal that this vision actually has something that that is resonating across governments globally. When it comes to the feedback that we received so far it's been exciting, extremely exciting in a sense that most people are are shared vision. We received some good criticism as well, which was, I mean, good good points to to take. But, yeah, the big request from governments now is really how can we do the movement from the vision to the implementation? So how can we how can we build this vision? As simple as it is. And for us, it means what are the deliverables, the tools, the artifacts that we as the agentic state initiative can produce to help governments, move from vision to implementation. And if you have any question, any any idea on this, we are more than happy to take it.
I have thoughts. I don't have if I can say that I have ideas. What I think is that, once that are there are a lot of agents, AI agents that, interact with each other, then, maybe there could be also some, AI agents that, tries to simplify the system. System. So if there is, I don't know, something that goes in one direction, the other one the other direction can be also low, but sometimes loss can be, overlapping or, like, saying different things, like, and, and so in in that way, maybe the the agents can, find the incorrect things and find the and and simplify simplify the the not the problem. The, I don't know how to to I'm missing the word at the moment. And, yeah, I'm really curious to see, if this could happen, because then, it will it could actually lead to a very different social and political system if we because now they say also the, you know, bureaucracy is heavy in some way. Mhmm. And so if we simplify it and it becomes not, it becomes light, then, everything will change. And, I mean and now we have the question about when, the the window sometimes. So we if we are talking about five years or Yeah. Ten years. But, yeah, these are those are my thoughts.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's useful. It's very useful.
Yeah. And and, yeah, and so many questions, so many thoughts, so many ideas, and, but not really a lot of answers. And, it's quite interesting to think that, these things could actually lead to know to a, to a different society, to a different world. And, and so it's extremely important as a topic, but there are no answers.
I mean, there are yeah. I mean, definitely, there are there are no answers, but there are some attempts of answers, which is what matters the most to drive action forward. So our let's say we we have been provocative with our proposal of the agentic state. Now it seems like the word is just full of question marks. The exercise that we gotta do in the next month is go one by one to each question mark and trying to have a look closely and try to to understand how actually we can we can build this vision of the agentic state and we can, we can find balances between different tensions that exist in the government adoption of AI and and technology in general. But it's that's an exciting attempt, to be honest. It's very exciting. So it's, yeah, it's it's a bunch of questions that don't have an answer, and our humble effort is to go closer to things, and try to unveil some of the truth that is there and and try to to surface some pieces of answers. And, hopefully, this will be, let's say, useful for governments to to move forward.
Yeah. And and now, maybe I have some ideas about what we were seeing about the AB testing, like, how maybe policies if there is a new policies, how it can be implemented maybe on a small, part of the population. Maybe this approach can be also used for the agentic states. Mhmm.
I mean, definitely. Indeed, one of the testing is is crucial, essential idea of the agentic state. Taking an iteration kind of approach, a testing kind of approach, an experimental kind of approach, it's it will be the bread and butter of of the agentic state. And especially from a cultural standpoint, this will be one of the biggest changes because so far, innovation is often happening only in a few limited teams in public administration, innovation units, the digital government units. But in practice, the the agentic status we are describing and envisioning, will require experimentation to happen across whole government activities, which will be a big cultural shift. But it's, it will definitely lead to better results and better outcomes. I mean, when we say better results, in the end, it's literally always improvements for citizens. It's, it's efficiency gain, it's effectiveness gains, it's improvements of trust, but it's ultimately improvements, for citizens.
And okay about citizens. From, like, the point of view for citizen, because at the moment, I'm thinking that maybe, the paper is more for people that are working in the field or people that are very passionate about the topic. And so I wonder, like, from, the normal citizen, What could be something that I mean, of course, reading the paper, trying to understand, like, the changes that, we are assisting in our society. But, yeah, it will be a it is a if agentic, the agentic state way is implemented. And as we have seen, the cost of inaction is so high that probably, this will be, the way. I wonder, like, how to explain it to a citizen or also yeah. Yeah. Like, what could be the role of the citizen? Because it is through what you have said that then all the state that is that works as a in a with the speed of a machine, basically.
Mhmm.
Without the human's bottleneck, bureaucracy, and so on. Yeah. I wonder, like, the citizen, what can can do I mean, from an active point of view. Because, these let's say if, people that are working in the field politician and so on implement the agentic state, then in some way they are, at the moment, passive. Then, of course, they can become active if we as we have said, like, if there are let's say, there are citizen assemblies and citizen assembly produce an app to output, and the output is an input for the agentic state. Mhmm.
I mean, what can citizens do? The first step is literally to I mean, the experience of citizens will be very different in the agentic state, and it will be much better. And it means that when I need to do my taxes, it's not a continuous flow between my accountant and the the PIVDAR and contradictory interface of the the finance ministry or public services portals online, but it's a much quicker, more efficient, and more personalized experience, which happens without technically technical problems. And, again, it's personalized. It's tailored to the needs and to the situation of each one of us. What can citizens do to to push this agenda forward? I mean, not much. This is this is state transformation and citizens, most of the time, do not really care about changing public services. What they can do is provide feedback, but for those that are more curious and active, what is something that is important to try to do is to actually build the pieces of the agentic state. There is a lot that we can do, in terms of building the vision, building the nuances of the agentic state. I think the big call that we are trying to do that we would do is come join us in the effort of imagining how the future should look like. And more practically for those that have technical skills or or those that have imagination skills, it's try to vibe code how a public service would look like in the authentic state. Try to explore how procurement process could look like. If you're curious about governance, try to help us define how the governance frameworks should look like. If you are into civic tech, let's let's deep dive and try to to define more closely how participation will change in the future. I think this is the kind of efforts that everyone on the ground, can do. And it's precisely the kind of efforts that we are doing. We are trying to get closer to we are trying to refine our vision of the future and then understand what are the tools and the resources that are needed to get there. But this imaginative effort is something that is accessible to everyone, and you don't really need to be in in governments to do that. And, I mean, we, at least me personally, I'm in conversation with people in government, but I'm not in government. And, yeah, you can you can do efforts and imagine things differently, and that will itself be a driver for change.
This is something that I really like, that I think is probably something, special of the technological space, that, in some ways, allows everyone to participate because I see this, also maybe similar to, you know, like, open source products, because something really, the genetic state should be open and Yeah. Transparent to to citizens. So every time there is something, could be a problem, could be something else, then then maybe the citizen can participate and proposing their so is solution.
Yeah. I mean, in general, the identity state will be open, will be transparent, will be built on open source solutions as much as possible. That's that's the way to go. So, definitely, the whole approach is the one of open source communities. The code is there for everyone to improve it.
I'm sure that a lot of people will like it. And, also, I haven't asked you anything anything about you. I mean, you mentioned something about your academic life and, working background. But, would you like to share, something more personal, about you? I know that you play the guitar now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I do.
I do. I I published some songs with a friend of mine. I mean, with my colleague, with my music colleague, and and I'm working on new album. That's true. Let's see if it's gonna come out soon. I'm not sure, but that's my effort beyond helping government build the Atlantic State.
And, yeah, do you have, I don't know, a message for the people that are working in similar field?
I think my main effort my main suggestion is try to have a look at the vision paper if it resonates. And then there are so many question marks that are open, and any any input is more than welcome. Any layer of the of our framework comes with a 100,000 problems, and we can start with the first one, public services. And so the the first question that I would have is, how should the interface of new public agentic public services look like? Like, in terms of digital interface, I've I've no clue. Will it be something like chat? So classic experience of Judge Petit. Well, maybe. I don't know. That's that's might be part of how it's gonna look like. And and then we're gonna go on workflows and then on regulation and how for instance, regulation right now, we were discussing it before. How will rules as code change under generative AI and the new NLP, capabilities? Well, that's again a question that we we didn't have the the time and the space to reflect on, but it's important. And I think everyone can contribute to this movement towards the agentic state. And I mean, it's it's not at all a political movement. It's really like government doing efforts to to go towards the vision, but any input is more than welcome, and we are excited to build it. So it's, it's a big effort, but we're trying to get there, which is very exciting.
Thank you, Simone. It was very interesting. I don't know if you want to add something else if you have other questions.
I mean, I'm I'm just a fan of the podcast, so I will I will, I mean, enjoy the the future episodes.
Thank thank you a lot again. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Bye.
