Startup investors and leaders in artificial intelligence and education from the Bay Area, Ukraine and Baltic nations will come together Friday for a conference in San Francisco to discuss how each region is responding and adapting to the rapid growth of AI.
The daylong forum, called “Resilience in the Age of Agentic AI: Baltic Spotlight,” will serve as a medium to share cross-border perspectives on the impact of AI on business operations, democracy, and education. It will be held at the ballroom in the Grand Hyatt San Francisco near Union Square.
Speakers from Ukraine and Baltic countries, which include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, will join educators, Silicon Valley investors, and AI experts. The event is part of the festival called “West Coast Estonian Days,” where the Estonian diaspora comes together to celebrate culture and connection since 1953.
The morning will be spent discussing the evolution of agentic AI and its implications for business operations.
Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that operates autonomously. Instead of having a human ask an AI assistant to complete a task, agentic AI uses multiple “agents” to take actions and complete tasks on its own without human supervision.
Working with AI agents
Andre Nakkurt is an Estonian startup founder and lead volunteer organizer for the event’s morning session on agentic AI. The discussion will center on the advent of agentic AI and emphasize the need for companies to adopt the emerging technology.
“The shift from doing the work to directing agents that do it is the biggest change to white-collar jobs in a generation,” he said in an interview. “And it’s already happening.”
He invited startup founders with Baltic and Ukrainian roots, agentic AI engineers, and U.S. investors to discuss the urgency for companies to implement agentic AI in their operations.
They will also talk about how small startups or companies in resource-constrained markets like the Baltics are able to quickly adapt to agentic AI.
“Each of the Baltic countries has the talent, capital, regulatory frameworks, and burgeoning ecosystems to support early-stage startups,” said Ģirts Graudiņš, a Latvian American entrepreneur and investor who is moderating the panel. “By looking beyond single-country initiatives and promoting the region as a whole, policymakers can gain the scale to position the Baltics as a compelling innovation hub on a global stage.”
The morning will conclude with a section where startups will have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to investors.
A networking lunch will follow to encourage connection between startup founders and investors. The theme of the lunch is to explore an idea of establishing a “San Francisco Baltic Innovation Hub” as a shared platform for business diplomacy and strategic visibility.
Sustaining democratic values
The afternoon portion will focus on how the Baltics are aiming to sustain democratic values amid technological disruption in the rapidly evolving AI industry, as well as another panel discussion on how Bay Area and California schools can learn from Estonia’s approach to integrating AI in education.
Anne-Marie Riitsaar, the lead volunteer organizer of the event’s afternoon portion, will kick off the second half of the day with remarks. Estonian Minister of Education and Research Kristina Kallas will deliver a keynote speech called “Redefining Education: Harnessing AI for Cognitive Growth.”
Andrew and Sylvia Thompson run the Kistler-Ritso Estonian Foundation, the main sponsor of the event. They will present on the foundation’s efforts to boost connectivity between Silicon Valley and Estonia, as well as on Estonia’s use of AI and technology as a way to help empower citizens in contrast to the U.S. government’s inefficiencies.
“These conversations matter because they ask how we protect judgment, trust, and democratic values at a time when technology is reshaping how we learn, communicate, and understand the world around us,”
Marit Davey, 2026 West Coast Estonian Days president
“What Estonia is doing yet again is to lead the world on the path of how you empower your citizens with technology, not your government or your corporations,” Andrew Thompson said in an interview. “It’s about how the government economy can learn from Estonia, that’s where the gap is.”
Another panel with several speakers will focus on information integrity and what can happen to democratic societies if AI agents start to have capabilities of building their own AI systems
“These conversations matter because they ask how we protect judgment, trust, and democratic values at a time when technology is reshaping how we learn, communicate, and understand the world around us,” said Marit Davey, the president of the 2026 West Coast Estonian Days.
Education in the spotlight
The latter part of the afternoon will center around approaches on using AI in education, comparing school systems in the Bay Area to those in Estonia. It will include a panel discussion featuring Bay Area educators and officials leading Estonia’s campaign for AI in schools.
Dan Effland will moderate the panel. Effland is the senior director of innovation at Summit Schools, a charter school system with several schools in the Bay Area where AI literacy is being taught to students and teacher.
“It’s an incredible group of panelists, so I’m very excited,” he said in an interview. “While there’s an important aspect of it that is about teaching kids or adults how to use these AI tools, much more it’s about helping them understand them, and then be able to make decisions about how or how not to use a tool.”
Minister Kallas, one of the panelists, said in an interview that Estonia’s approach is centered on using AI to encourage critical thinking in students instead of having the technology do the thinking for them. The Estonian government has a contract with OpenAI where a special version of ChatGPT was created designed specifically for students.
“We use AI to develop the skills of critical thinking, assessment, and evaluation,” she said. “General purpose AI tools are not necessarily good for education, for learning, so you need to design specific AI tools that they can use for learning purposes.”
One of the goals of the panel is to understand how a similar strategy can be applied to schools in the Bay Area and California.
Riitsaar is hoping that the forum will be a space where AI leaders in both the Bay Area and Baltic countries can exchange ideas to help keep up with the fast-moving pace of AI innovation.
“By learning from one another, we can help democratic societies adapt to rapid technological change while preserving the values that make them worth protecting,” she said.
Members of the public who wish to attend the event can purchase tickets online.
