Something remarkable has been happening in Azerbaijan in recent years. Government institutions are being digitized at a pace that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. A region that 10–15 years ago was considered a laggard in high technology is not simply catching up — it is increasingly looking like a success story in rolling out digitization across a state system.
This shift happened at the policy level: the approved Digital Development Acceleration Action Plan for 2026–2028 specifically lays out the myGov and myGov Business ecosystems, the development of a government cloud, data exchange, APIs, and new digital mechanisms for businesses.
The change shows up beyond documents, too. According to U.N. data, Azerbaijan climbed to 74th place in the E-Government Development Index in 2024 and for the first time joined the group of countries with a very high EGDI.
The infrastructure itself was being changed at the same time. In January 2026, the deputy minister of digital development and transport stated that the Online Azerbaijan project had brought fiber-optic broadband coverage to nearly 100% of the country by the end of 2025, while median fixed internet speeds had grown from roughly 10 Mbps in 2020 to 90 Mbps by late 2025. That context explains a lot: digitizing public services only starts to deliver results when the state has not just a portal, but the physical means to reach someone in a small town or village.
To make sense of what is going on, we turned to Rufat Babakishiyev — an Azerbaijani IT entrepreneur, founder of Crocusoft, head of KGroup / BakıKart, and expert in digital transformation. Crocusoft operates at the intersection of custom software development, digital services, and solutions for both business and government clients, while KGroup / BakıKart plays a key role in advancing digital transport and payment infrastructure in Azerbaijan. Crocusoft has been involved in developing services for the Ministry of Justice and municipal platforms, and Rufat himself regularly speaks on the role of the state, the private sector, and AI in digital transformation.
2Digital: The Azerbaijani authorities are now planning to move all government digital services into the myGov and myGov Business ecosystem. It sounds convenient, but could it turn into a bottleneck where a single error or vulnerability takes down the entire system at once?
Rufat: To understand what is going on, I need to walk you through, in broad strokes, how Azerbaijan got started with digitization. It has been unfolding over the past decade, but really picked up speed after 2020. When the pandemic hit, demand for online services shot up dramatically, and that started to pay off.
Our company alone built applications for the Ministry of Justice, customs, the Customs Committee and Ministry of Affairs, and several other government agencies. None of them ended up as box-ticking exercises — they all turned out to be genuinely in demand. That matters: each application proved its worth on its own.
At some point, the government came to the realization that it was time to bring together the separate digital offices of different agencies onto a single platform — what they call MyGov.
How effective it will turn out to be, we’ll see from the results. The MyGov application may end up housing hundreds of services, but if half of them work poorly or fail to catch on, there will be a lot of reworking to do. With software of this kind, what matters enormously is how easily it is picked up and used by people with little or no experience working online.
Every time we build applications for government agencies, we put ourselves in the shoes of someone with minimal digital experience — someone living in a village, out in the regions. That user experience is the one you have to study first, because it is the hardest to get right during rollout, and the most important.
Fortunately, there are already enough applications and experienced developers today to make the MyGov consolidation project viable. And the best way to avoid a bottleneck effect is to configure the system so that individual services can operate independently if needed. Think of it like a ship taking on water: it has bulkheads that let you seal off the damaged section while the ship stays afloat and keeps moving.
2Digital: Your company worked on solutions for the Ministry of Justice, including Mobile Notary, and on portals for municipalities. In practice, what turned out to be the hardest part of digitizing the state?
Rufat: One important thing to point out here is that a generational shift has taken place among Azerbaijani civil servants. A lot of younger people have come in — and 30 to 40% of them moved into public administration after proving themselves in private business at senior management level. They all have a modern education. Naturally, they are comfortable with technology, and they are genuinely interested in modernizing processes and rolling out digitization across the board.
They fundamentally changed the mindset around the relationship between government and society. Online services not only cut down on bureaucracy — they also significantly reduce the opportunities where corruption could even theoretically take place.
There were challenges, of course.
The first was outdated legislation. Most of it dated back to the 1990s and had fallen badly behind modern technological realities. That changed significantly: the regulatory framework was brought in line with contemporary standards fairly quickly.
The second was resistance from some mid- and lower-level civil servants who simply did not believe that e-government could work effectively. Some were skeptical, others were reluctant to rework their processes to meet new standards — there are always plenty of people who are not fond of innovation.
But this turned out to be the easiest obstacle to get past. I noticed that when a country’s top leadership is confident it is on the right track and keeps pushing for change, the system starts to transform fairly quickly.
In general, innovations tend to get implemented fast in Azerbaijan, because people there are enthusiastic about technology. Mobile coverage is very high, modern smartphones are hugely popular — iPhones especially. Over the past three years, the Ministry of Digitalization has carried out a major project that brought fiber-optic connectivity to literally every village in the country.
Now picture this: on one side, excellent internet coverage; on the other, a simple, intuitive interface for government service applications. That combination produced explosive user growth even in remote areas.
When Crocusoft was working on one application after another, I was repeatedly asked: “Why did you build it this way rather than making it look polished?” My answer was always the same: the main goal is for a grandfather in a remote village to pick up a smartphone and figure it out easily.
Over time, an unexpected dynamic emerged: government agencies started competing with each other over who could roll out digitization faster and better.
2Digital: Today the government is moving further and there is an idea to bring all services together on a single platform — what are the prospects for that?
Rufat: To be honest, I do not know yet, because I have not been invited to this particular project so far. The main thing is to assemble a team of professional practitioners who have experience delivering projects of this kind. I think what matters much more here is a strong project management team and the ability to set up coordination with different government agencies. Put briefly, in this case managing the process properly is even more important than writing the code.
2Digital: You have also worked on applications related to the law. That is an area where hallucinations are especially dangerous. These services are now starting to integrate artificial intelligence. What safeguards need to be in place so that AI in legal services does not start making mistakes?
Rufat: A high-quality dataset that this AI runs on is extremely important. It, together with the flow of how it operates, should create a situation that can conventionally be described as “law as code,” where the legal norm is the sole source governing all processes. This is not a trivial task — for example, in the eGov system we created, there are more than 50,000 documents…
2Digital: Azerbaijan is talking about a government cloud, a unified e-Government Information System, and strengthening cyber defenses. In your view, do government agencies genuinely understand that digitization also means managing risk, data, and cybersecurity?
Rufat: Azerbaijan has strong security services. They were quick to embrace the concept of digitization — and just as quick to grasp the risks that come with it. Today, virtually every government agency has its own cybersecurity team. On top of that, there are three bodies that regularly audit cybersecurity across government systems. These are: the State Service for Special Communication and Information Security, the National Cybersecurity Center, and the Electronic Security Service.
I can see that in recent years more and more government and private companies are putting money into cybersecurity infrastructure, and that is encouraging.
2Digital: You have worked with municipal services, legal platforms, and even a police mobile application. Tell us — at what point did you see the biggest impact of your work?
Rufat: I may be repeating myself, but this really does matter. For me, the clearest measure of what we do is when someone living in a remote village starts using an application effectively after it rolls out. Picture the situation: not long ago, that person had to travel to the district center — 10 to 30 kilometers away — just to drop off a single document.
Once there, they might sit in a queue for several hours, only to find out they had brought the wrong document. And sometimes that happened several days in a row.
Today I see people in remote areas sending requests and documentation online instantly. It saves them a tremendous amount of time.
Of course, it is gratifying that hundreds of thousands of people in Baku use our applications every day. But the fact that they have reached people who are far removed from technology — and turned out to be genuinely useful to them — that is what I am truly proud of.
2Digital: Azerbaijan is clearly moving toward closer collaboration between the state and the private sector in digitization. What functions must the government keep in-house, and which ones can be handed off to private technology companies?
Rufat: I have said many times that the government should always focus exclusively on regulation. Not on writing software, not on acting as a developer or an engineer — but on creating the kind of legislation and conditions that make working with private contractors clear, transparent, and predictable.
Why should it work that way? Because a private company always has more at stake in delivering a quality product rather than simply spending down a budget. If its experience working with its own government turns out to be successful, other countries may take an interest in the software — and that usually means good contracts. More than 70% of the world’s projects originate in government agencies. They are by far the largest clients.
That said, you absolutely cannot hand everything over to a private company and simply trust that it will be honest, open, and motivated to do the best possible job. When we built applications for government agencies, we always asked them to assign us a few representatives who were genuinely invested in the project and willing to dive into it fully — monitoring, adjusting, and staying on top of everything as it developed.
In our view, this is a mutually beneficial arrangement: on one side, officials who have a thorough understanding of the bureaucratic and business processes within their own agency; on the other, us, with deep knowledge of the technology side.