Better Services for Citizens with AI – Helsinki Partners with Digia in Three New AI Pilots

Helsinki’s Kokeilukiihdyttämö program (“Experiment Accelerator”) will launch 14 new pilots this autumn to identify and evaluate the opportunities offered by digitalization and AI. Digia is a corporate partner in three of these pilots.

Digia also participated in the previous round of Kokeilukiihdyttämö, which yielded promising results in AI utilization: AI completed weeks of work in just 10 minutes – Helsinki tested AI-based image recognition to detect errors in a registry.

The new AI pilots by Digia and Helsinki focus on tangible everyday benefits for citizens:

1. AI Helping to Break the Language Barrier for Immigrants

Many people moving to Helsinki from abroad face challenges accessing information, as service details are scattered across various sources and often only available in Finnish, Swedish, or English. Language barriers can hinder understanding, make service paths unclear, and raise the threshold for seeking help.

This pilot aims to compile essential arrival-phase information into an instructional video. AI will be used to produce and translate the video into multiple languages, such as Hindi, Arabic, or Farsi. To assess the quality of AI-generated translations, native speakers will review them to determine whether AI can consistently produce high-quality content.

2. AI Providing New Insights into Youth Work Trends and Resource Needs

Currently, youth work monitoring relies on each youth center’s records of daily events and visitor numbers. Manually reviewing this data is time-consuming and not fully utilized.

In this pilot, the records will be processed with AI to convert them into numerical and comparable formats. The goal is to gain insights into youth work phenomena and trends, improve unit comparability, and facilitate resource planning.

3. AI Accelerating Guidance for Elderly Services

A chat-based AI assistant will be developed for city employees to help assess the service needs of elderly citizens. This tool will streamline information retrieval from vast data sources.

Employees assess the needs for home services and round-the-clock care. Around 300 employees work in these roles, each potentially managing hundreds of clients. Fragmented data, frequent updates, and complex legislation make information retrieval slow. The AI assistant is expected to significantly speed up this process, freeing more time for direct client work.

"It’s great to see how these pilots bring AI from vision to everyday life! Helping immigrants access services, enabling youth workers to identify where help is needed, and supporting the elderly more quickly – I believe these pilots will provide valuable insights for developing the city’s digital services," says Ville Meloni, Kokeilukiihdyttämö Project Manager at the City of Helsinki.

The pilots will begin in August–September, and results will be shared in early 2026.

More information:

Ville Meloni
Project Manager, City of Helsinki
Tel. +358 40 026 0000
ville.meloni(a)hel.fi
kokeilukiihdyttamo.hel.fi

Minna Häkämies
Head of Data Insight, Digia
Tel. +358 40 516 6108
minna.hakamies(a)digia.com