Serbia's Quiet Digital Transformation

This opinion piece was originally published in Serbian in the Danas daily on February 21, 2026. Nicola Pontara is the World Bank Country Manager for Serbia. Tiago Peixoto is a Senior Digital Specialist at the World Bank.

In January of this year, the World Bank published the global ranking of the latest GovTech Maturity Index, which measures the quality of the foundations of governments' digital infrastructure and policies. Buried in the data was a remarkable story: Serbia entered the world's top 10 digital government performers, up from 51st in 2020.

How did Serbia pull this off? By making sustained, strategic investment in infrastructure that most citizens never see. A $50 million World Bank project called Enabling Digital Governance (EDGE) helped Serbia build the plumbing of modern government. New interoperability platforms connected previously siloed databases; a government cloud began hosting more than 420 systems for 80 public entities; a Security Operations Center now processes nearly a billion security events daily. On cybersecurity, the International Telecommunication Union ranks Serbia as a global model, ahead of many G7 economies.

But Serbia did not only strengthen infrastructure: it invested in people too.More than 13,000 civil servants were trained in paperless processes, data management, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). An AI-powered assistant now handles citizen questions: in its first two months, it dealt with over 200,000 episodes, reducing inquiries to human staff by 18 percent and freeing up time for teams to focus on more complex cases. Services that once required multiple trips to government offices can now be completed online. By one estimate, citizens save over five million hours annually, and usage has reached 2.5 million users, double the original target of the EDGE project.

The story is impressive, but the job is not done. More work is needed to reach less well-off segments of the population. The next phase must go beyond making services available online to making them genuinely easy to use, shifting from expecting citizens to navigate portals to proactively reaching them through simpler interfaces, mobile-first design, and channels they already trust.

Rankings and lived experience are also not a perfect overlap. Indices measure infrastructure and policies, but do not fully capture citizens' experiences and service usability. Citizens may still encounter complex interfaces, inconsistent service quality, and the friction that comes when digital layers sit on top of old procedures. The introduction of AI also brings new challenges, such as making sure it works as well in the Serbian language as it does in English.

In such transformative processes, it is essential to involve beneficiaries in the design of systems and services.A new World Bank project called Serbian Ecosystem for Resilient, Verifiable, and Inclusive Services (SERVIS) aims to address these gaps: developing digital wallets, investing in Serbian-language AI performance, and building on the solid cybersecurity foundations as threats grow more sophisticated. The overarching goal is to make government complexity fade into the background, so that renewing a driver's license or registering a business feels no more difficult than ordering a car ride.

Serbia's success offers lessons for other countries in ECA and beyond. First, digital government requires a comprehensive vision rather than siloed, one-off investments. Second, it should not be treated as a technology upgrade, but as a state-wide reform of service delivery. Third, civil servants must be willing to change the way they work, freeing themselves from paperwork to focus on what only humans can do: listen, explain, and solve the problems that resist easy answers. Even in a world where technology constantly races ahead, the work of truly serving citizens remains a stubbornly human endeavor.