Manuel Kilian has worked at the intersection of government and technology for more than ten years: as an advisor to governments, an author, the head of an international organisation and a tech founder.
He currently advises several governments; for Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, he oversees the House of Germany at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. He is also Co-Founder of The Agentic State, an initiative rethinking government action with the help of agentic AI.
As founding managing director, he previously built the Global Government Technology Centre Berlin, a joint initiative of the World Economic Forum and a number of governments. With GovMind, Europe’s leading research platform for public-sector software, he founded a startup and led it through to its acquisition in 2024.
Manuel Kilian Lecture Topics
Manuel Kilian’s talks address how states use technology successfully, how they change as a result, and what this means for business and society. The following themes take centre stage:
- Digital Statecraft, or: why some states succeed in their digital transformation, and why we need to understand it as a discipline of statecraft in its own right.
Estonia, Singapore, India and Ukraine have achieved, under entirely different conditions, what others fail at despite money and know-how. The talk reveals what they do differently and the ten forces that decide whether a state’s digital transformation succeeds or fails.
- The Agentic State, or: how agentic AI can enable a new understanding of government action, and what states must do to succeed in the age of agentic AI.
What if the state no longer just did things right, but did the right things? The talk shows how agentic AI makes exactly this possible, why workflows matter more than org charts, and how governments get from pilot to delivery.
- Technological Sovereignty, or: why we should avoid the term sovereignty, and why we need an entrepreneurial state.
Instead of debating the term sovereignty, we should ask where and how Europe can become technologically indispensable. The talk shows why that takes an entrepreneurial state that bets early, enables scale and shares in success.
In his talks, Manuel Kilian combines the perspectives of a founder, a government advisor and an author with examples from around the world, analytically grounded and engagingly told.
More about Manuel Kilian
His book “How Nations Digitise: The Ten Forces of Digital Statecraft” will be published in November 2026. It treats the digital transformation of government and public administration as a discipline of statecraft in its own right, and shows how governments around the world master it: through discipline, through will, and at times by chance.
Manuel Kilian writes for publications such as Handelsblatt and Table Media and speaks regularly at major international conferences, including the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos and the World Governments Summit in Dubai. He completed his MPhil in Public Policy with distinction at the University of Cambridge.