Albania, Estonia, France, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Latvia, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland took part in the parallel audit of the supreme audit institutions led by the State Controller of Israel. The audit was carried out from May 2024 to December 2025. It used a common analytical framework covering 9 topics and more than 92 structured questions to compare the preparedness of the countries in strategic, infrastructural and operational dimensions.
The rapid development of AI in recent years has created new opportunities for the public sector, but the parallel audit showed that their implementation is rather at an early stage. Although several authorities of the states covered by the audit are developing and testing AI-based solutions, they have not yet delivered significant benefits in terms of quality of service, speed of decision-making and cost savings. Many countries are moving rapidly from ambition to action, but preparedness remains uneven: development is accelerating where strategy, finance, governance, data, skills and control mechanisms are developing together, and stalling where they are developing separately.
The results of the survey conducted by the Estonian National Audit Office showed that the wider adoption of AI in Estonian state authorities is hampered primarily by a lack of awareness of the possibilities of applying AI in their field, the occasional poor quality of data and insufficient skills to develop appropriate solutions. The inability to cope with legal requirements and data protection rules was also seen as an obstacle.
