Agentic Nations and Enterprises
What happens to us when the hype becomes reality?
- Speaker
- Kaspar Korjus
- Stage
- DPW Amsterdam
- Runtime
- 18 minutes
One man has built the digital layer twice. Once for a country, once for the world's largest companies. At DPW Amsterdam he put both maps on one stage and asked what they mean for the people living inside them.
“You may think: why the hell is this guy wearing this kind of suit at a cool startup event?” Kaspar Korjus walked on in white tie, the Order of Orange-Nassau on his lapel. The King of the Netherlands awarded it to him for building Estonia's e-Residency. He had promised the King to wear it to the most important event in the Netherlands. So here he was.
He told the story from two angles. First the government side, because he is still AI advisor to the Prime Minister of Estonia and has spent ten years helping governments become digital. Then the enterprise side: how the largest companies in the world have automated procurement end to end with agents, and what is really happening in production. And he left the room with one question. What does it all mean to us?
“Besides procurement professionals, we are also citizens.”
Ten phases
More than ten years ago, Kaspar drew a map of where nations end up in fifty years. It was shared with the President of the United States and the King of the Netherlands. The slides are a decade old. The map still holds.
It starts on paper. Most governments are still there today: signatures, photocopies, the same form for every service. The first move is to name people, to give every person a unique digital ID that computers recognise. Kaspar calls his own number “a beautiful name”.
Once the state knows who you are, it can build an app store. E prescriptions, driving licence renewals, taxes declared within minutes. Then you connect all the dots, so nobody ever has to provide the same data twice.
Phase five is where it gets interesting. If every service already exists for citizens, why not open them to foreigners? Kaspar started e-Residency more than ten years ago. Today there are 130,000+ e-residents worldwide. Estonia has about 1.2 million citizens. The potential subscribers number in the billions. If that continues, he said, within a decade Estonia could replace taxes with subscriptions.
Estonians
~1.2 million
Potential subscribers
Billions
Then come robots. Kaspar's older brother, a Pactum co founder, was AI lead for Starship Technologies' delivery robots. We will live alongside them whether we like it or not, and they do help. Next, a nation you can invest in like a company, through its own tokens. Europe's central bank stopped Estonia's plan. “If I go back to government, I'll try to make that happen still.” And if e-residents bring revenue, they should help make decisions. They have already changed more than ten laws.
“In twenty, twenty five years, we don't trust our civil servants to make decisions for us. We trust AI more.”
Phase 09
Your agent, at your service
How can I help you today?
- Register a company
- Declare taxes
- Pay bills
- Run it remotely
Ask your agent
Ten years ago, nobody saw phase nine coming. Last week the Estonian government approved digital identities for AI agents, set to pass into law at the end of the year. Ask one agent to register a company and declare its taxes. Or ask a hundred to run fully autonomous companies.
The last phase is the nation as a service. With the identity layer, the application layer and AI on top, no country needs to build it alone. Kaspar gives it another thirty years.
The point of it all: nations are becoming tech platforms like Google, serving humanity like never before. Bad public services stop being a monopoly you simply live with. And a nation no longer needs to conquer land to become rich. It can build better services instead.
Procurement in 2030
Seven years ago Kaspar left government and founded Pactum with his friend Martin and his brother Kristjan. The first customer was Walmart, with a hundred billion dollars of spend going unmanaged. One percent of that is a billion a year.
It's 2030. Pactum is no longer an interface used by your company. It's your company's AI employee that sits in the boardroom and helps directly advise on the company's decision making. By the time the meeting ends and the way forward is agreed, your AI employee is already implementing thousands of new actions simultaneously.
Read the original 2020 post →The thesis did not raise much money at first. It was not believable. Ahead of the 2030 deadline, Kaspar stood on the DPW stage and called it: mission accomplished. Then he showed how it works, end to end, on real production screens.
It begins in a management meeting. A new strategy is agreed: new policies, new certificates to request from suppliers, a sharper view of which suppliers to use. From there, the agents take it all the way to a signed price.
- 01Agent listens to a management strategy meeting
- 02Uploads a new category strategy doc
- 03Creates new policies and checks
- 04Deploys policies tested on historical spend
- 05Supports intake
- 06Creates requests
- 07Validates checks
- 08Creates SOW
- 09Adds suppliers
- 10Reaches for bids
- 11Negotiates
- 12Selects a winner
- 13Agrees prices for 12 months
- 14Monitors materials for new opportunities
Humans can step in at any point. But one step shows the shift better than any other.Validating every check on a requisition used to take Pactum's clients four to five business days.
Now it takes 30 to 90 seconds.
Agents run hundreds of checks in parallel, at a 99 percent plus accuracy rate. “Whatever you want to buy, you can get that instantly now.”
What it means for companies. Changing strategy used to take years through fifty layers of management. Now it takes minutes, even with two million employees. Working capital weak at the end of the quarter? Change the policy on payment days, and voilà. Companies can tune their strategy every week.
It also changes who gets hired and promoted. Someone has to hire agents, fire agents, tell them what to do and track their KPIs. These are new jobs with new titles, and the younger generation picks them up fast.
Two futures
AI led nations. AI led enterprises. Kaspar ended where every serious conversation about agents ends: what does this mean for us as human beings?
The warning
Jaan Tallinn, an early investor in Anthropic and DeepMind and a backer of Pactum, has studied the alignment problem for two decades. It is not solved. Agents can do things you don't want them to do.
It can go wrong in the labs, and it can go wrong the same way in how we deploy agents. Writing “don't do anything stupid” into a prompt does not help. Live agents need a different discipline.
The promise
People often tell him Pactum makes people lose their jobs. “We haven't seen that.” When technology arrives, people do not run out of things to do. It empowers them to do more.
AI agents can be smarter than humans at some things and still make us better, more empowered beings.
He asked the room to raise a hand if they have kids, and to keep it up if laundry and dishes take half an hour a day. Almost every hand stayed up.
Two machines. One hour a day, back to his family.
Three kids at home, and the dishwasher and washing machine save him about an hour every day. “I am empowered, my kids are empowered.” That, he argued, is what agents do at work too.
Let's embrace AI agents. Safely, but let's embrace them.
Indirect spend, finally under control
See how the agents Kaspar showed on the DPW stage check, decide, source and negotiate every indirect request, end to end.