Astana, 12 November. Licences and permits under 12 public services for business in Kazakhstan are issued by an information system, without the involvement of a government employee, the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development said.
Previously, according to the ministry, certain licences and permits took from 15 to 30 calendar days. An entrepreneur collected documents, took them to a government body and waited for them to be checked and a decision to be made. Now, for the automated services, it is enough to submit an electronic application. The system itself obtains the necessary information from state databases, checks it against the established requirements and, if all conditions are met, produces a positive decision. The ministry writes that a procedure that used to take weeks is now completed instantly, and the decision is made according to uniform rules set in advance.
The slowest link in the procedure, judging by the result, was the procedure itself.
The ministry stresses that the paper process was not simply transferred into electronic form as it stood. First the process itself was simplified and unnecessary stages removed, requirements were revised, state information systems were connected and the decision-making rules were translated into digital format, and only then was automation introduced.
“If a decision can be made on the basis of reliable digital data and clear requirements, it should be made automatically. This is not just a faster service but a qualitatively new level of interaction between the state and business,” said Ainur Yusupova, chair of the ministry’s Committee for Public Services. According to her, an entrepreneur will not have to gather information that the state already holds and wait for a manual check.
Automatic decision-making is already used in construction, agriculture, foreign trade, industrial safety, environmental protection and other areas. Since 2024, a total of 87,088 public services have been provided this way through the eLicense.kz portal: checks and decisions took place without manual consideration of applications. The ministry promises to extend this approach to other services where a decision can be made from digital data and established requirements.
The statement does not list which 12 services have been switched to automatic issuance.
What it means: The state has removed a person from the part of the procedure where they only compared information with requirements. A refusal or an approval now depends on what is recorded in state databases, so the accuracy of the data about the entrepreneur matters more.
Who benefits: In the ministry’s assessment, entrepreneurs gain: they start work faster and spend less time on administrative procedures, and they receive decisions based on objective and transparent criteria. The ministry adds that this approach reduces the influence of the human factor.
Background: The eLicense.kz portal is the state electronic licensing system through which applications for licences and permits are submitted. The ministry calls automatic issuance an example of the transition “from e-government to a digital state”: in e-government the submission of an application is digitised, in a digital state the decision-making itself is too.
We have also reported on how a digital public service centre with an AI assistant opened in Uralsk.
