Yakutian Officials Are Building AI Agents Themselves
The third cohort of professionals trained to work with artificial intelligence has completed its program in Yakutia. The “Osnovy II v rabochikh protsessakh: modeli i agenty” (AI Fundamentals for Workflows: Models and Agents) program trained 100 representatives of government agencies, municipalities and regional organizations.
During August, 100 representatives of government agencies and departments completed training at Sberbank’s “Shkola 21” (School 21) project. Participants studied AI models, built and configured AI agents, automated workflows and presented technical prototypes of their solutions at the end of the program. They included the “EkoProm” (EcoProm) system for automatically routing citizen requests, the “Urozhaynost” (Crop Yield) agent, which analyzes satellite and multispectral imagery of agricultural land, “NeyroStart” (NeuroStart) for automating reports from utility providers, Sentio for monitoring the information environment, and other tools.
These AI solutions can be deployed without relying on outside contractors. The region is already building its own talent pool of professionals capable of working with the technology. That approach aligns with Russia’s National AI Development Strategy, which calls for the share of employees with AI technology skills to reach 80% by 2030.
Continuous Training
Employee training is now to become a continuous process. AI projects are becoming increasingly necessary in government operations. Yakutia has already identified a range of areas that require digital tools, including processing documents and citizen requests, forecasting utility-sector emergencies and assessing the condition of municipal infrastructure, monitoring agriculture through satellite data and crop-condition analysis, supporting patients in health care, forecasting environmental conditions, and delivering personalized services in education and social services.
The regional strategy calls for establishing an AI research and development center in Yakutia, along with a dedicated data center. In practice, this could allow the region to move toward industrial-scale deployment of AI projects. Some of the solutions developed through the program could become full-fledged software products, find applications in other Russian regions and attract interest from other countries facing similar challenges in digitizing the public sector.
Yakutia Keeps Pace
In 2022, Yakutia identified AI as one of the key technologies to be adopted under its Regional Digital Transformation Strategy. The technology was slated for use in public services, education, construction, public safety and transport digitization. Those plans have already led to concrete steps. In 2024, Yakutia’s “Shkola 21” hosted the TechDays program on AI and machine learning for developers, management and operations teams. The following year, 100 employees of the republic’s ministries and agencies completed an intensive course, “Vvedenie v analiz dannykh” (Introduction to Data Analysis), at the same school. Participants developed projects for AI-based utility-tariff forecasting, spatial analytics, pollution monitoring, construction video surveillance and other applications.
A similar trend is taking hold in other Russian regions. Government employees in Tatarstan and the Novosibirsk and Rostov regions have already received training in building AI models and agents. In a number of other regions, including Moscow, the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, the Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk and Altai territories, and other Russian constituent regions, similar professional development programs are in place. More than 50 such programs are now available.
Government employees in other countries are also being trained to work with AI. For example, in 2025, government officials in Kazakhstan completed similar training.
A Test Bed for Agentic Government
The next stage of the Yakutia program will be to determine how many of the proposed solutions move from prototype status to industrial-scale deployment. Those decisions will affect the time needed to process citizen requests, labor requirements, government spending and forecasting accuracy. These metrics will ultimately show the program’s real-world impact.
Going forward, and in line with the approved regional strategy, Yakutia is likely to continue training government employees in new technologies, introduce specialized programs for individual sectors and expand the use of AI agents within government agencies. If successful, the region could become one of the Russian IT industry’s regional test beds for piloting an agentic model of digital government.
