How one digital leader earned trust in a government that wasn’t her own

How do you transform a government that isn’t your own? 

For Marta Arsovska-Tomovska, the answer lies in understanding the people and institutions behind it. 

The advisor to the president of the National Assembly of Serbia has worked on digital transformation in both North Macedonia and Serbia, giving her a perspective on what it takes to build trust in government across borders. 

After helping drive digital transformation in her home country, North Macedonia, she became Serbia’s director for digitalisation in 2017. 

In 2025, Serbia placed second in Europe and sixth globally in the GovTech Maturity Index, something she believes can be credited to the strong trust built in digital governance. 

Creating public buy-in involved “learning Serbia's own institutions and needs on their own terms, rather than importing solutions shaped for a different country.” 

If people are not willing to adopt new technology, even “airtight logic” cannot create a lasting reform, she says. 

“Digital transformation asks people to abandon habits built over decades. Skip that readiness, and it slows down, meets quiet resistance, or simply stalls between signatures.” 

Trust before technology 

This lesson started early for Arsovska-Tomovska, since her career began in the mid-1990s just as internet access was taking off. 

Building trust could start from steps as small as picking up the phone. 

When she led Unet, North Macedonia's first internet service provider, many would ring its call centre late at night with problems such as a jammed printer. 

“We answered anyway, patiently, every time,” shares the company’s then-chief executive. 

“We weren’t just selling a service; we were building trust in technology itself, one late-night call at a time.” 

After nearly a decade in her role, she joined North Macedonia’s Ministry of Information Society and Administration as a deputy minister in 2011, later becoming minister in 2015. 

The biggest difference Arsovska-Tomovska noticed when she joined the public sector was the scale of the impact her decisions would make. 

Every move no longer just impacted just one entity at a time, but could be touching the lives of a million people. 

Reform that reaches people 

People need to feel the tangible benefits of reforms in their daily lives, she says. 

“You can build the smartest system in the world, but if people don’t trust it, they won’t use it and nothing improves.” 

This concept holds strongly today, where artificial intelligence (AI) technologies make decisions that aren’t always visible. 

She shares: “Some of the strongest examples aren't even things citizens see directly: AI is helping doctors catch breast cancer earlier: for a patient, that's not a tech story, it's more time, a longer life.” 

For a digital reform to endure, citizens must feel the value of the policies implemented.

The Serbian government periodically runs a “digital caravan” programme, which aims to introduce technological reforms directly to the people. 

For example, in 2021, the caravan drove across 16 cities to provide citizens educational resources on the electronic government services available to them, as well as e-commerce and social media safety. 

In an iteration of the programme which concluded last year, the caravan visited schoolteachers and students across 12 cities, introducing a digital platform which could simplify lesson preparation, activity planning, and student support. 

AI needs foundations 

To Arsovska-Tomovska, leaders must have a clear picture of where their country is heading and deliver policies that prepare society for that future. 

Her experience also shaped how she approaches the next stage of digital transformation: the move from building digital services to preparing governments for artificial intelligence. 

AI is a “multiplier” on everything else a government tries to build, she says. 

That said, it is only a layer and not the foundation; AI can only be as good as the infrastructure, institutions and public trust behind it. 

She says: “If a government's databases don't talk to each other, if services still require paper forms behind the scenes, adding an AI chatbot on top doesn't fix any of that, it just gives citizens a friendlier way to hit the same wall.” 

She says this is ultimately what the AI race is about: not who deploys first, but who does the groundwork first.  

That will be among the ideas she brings to the Mainstage at Tech Week Singapore 2026, where she will speak in the Global AI Sprint: Unlocking Innovation in Governance & Business session.