Article
What happens when you bring together the skills of Aalto University students, real challenges from the public sector, and the latest AI tools? Ten students spent their summer job solving ten problems submitted by public administration bodies. The program showed how the technological shift is changing the ways the public sector can renew itself.
Senior Lead, Public Sector Productivity Programme
Published
20.8.2026
What do the public sector’s productivity challenges look like in everyday work?
Here’s one example: the legal obligation to redact confidential information from public documents consumes enormous resources. In the police administration alone, the need runs into millions of pages a year. The work is slow and prone to error.
This was one of the problems the Finnish Police Board gave students to solve as part of Aalto University‘s, AI company Lovable‘s, and Sitra’s AI Summer Program. While much of Finland was on holiday, 10 students developed solutions to concrete challenges submitted by public administration bodies.
The program’s broader goal was to explore how the renewal of the public sector could be accelerated by bringing together genuine challenges related to services and productivity, the cross-disciplinary skills of young people, university research, and company technology.
The 10 students selected for the program were offered an eight-week summer job. Over the summer, the students worked with different authorities on concrete bottlenecks and challenges. They developed solutions such as automating routine tasks, clarifying customer communication, and building prototypes of new digital services.
Participating organizations included the Finnish Heritage Agency, the Finnish Immigration Service, the Finnish National Agency for Education, the Finnish Police Board, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Kela, and Traficom.
Aalto was responsible for running the program and supervising the students. Lovable provided AI-based tools that make it possible to quickly test services with users. Sitra funded the program and contributed expertise on the needs and productivity potential of the public sector.
The summer job program is part of Sitra’s broader work to boost productivity in the public sector.
The program’s results were compiled into a playbook that can be used to apply the lessons more widely. In addition, the operating model developed through the program could be extended to other universities.
The program also raised broader questions. How can students’ up-to-date skills be put to use in society more quickly? How must higher education, research, and teaching change in the era of low-code tools? How can company technology help accelerate the renewal of the public sector? In this article, we share 5 lessons the program brought to light.
This observation is no longer entirely new, and people have been talking about vibe coding for a while already. The AI Summer Program also proved the shift to be real. A new generation of tools is radically lowering the barrier to technical implementation. Deep programming skills are no longer a prerequisite at every stage for building and testing a working solution.
The program showed that the public sector can benefit from fast, low-risk data and AI experiments precisely because development resources are scarce. Not everything needs to be solved through heavy projects or years-long system overhauls.
If a problem is scoped correctly, users are involved, and decision-making is close at hand, a great deal can be learned in a short time: what works, what doesn’t, and what should be developed next. A bigger impact, however, only comes once organizations’ ways of working and management also change as a result of the experiments.
In addition, agile service development done together with students can strengthen the public sector’s appeal as an employer. At its best, the public sector can appear to young people as a place that doesn’t just administer the present, but builds better services, a smoother everyday life, and Finland’s future.
This, however, requires bringing new tools, ways of working, and opportunities to the public sector — ways of working that feel interesting and meaningful to the new generation.
Aalto University students, for example, have up-to-date, cross-disciplinary skills in AI, data, design, software development, and systems thinking. They bring perspectives to organizations’ challenges that can be harder to see from the inside.
Yet this pool of expertise risks being left outside working life. According to Statistics Finland, the unemployment rate among 15–24-year-olds was 22.3 percent in June 2026. According to a study published in May 2026 by Suomalainen Työ ry, 94 percent of 16–26-year-olds felt it was too difficult to find a summer job.
Beyond students’ own lives, their employment is also about Finland’s broader renewal. If the first steps into working life are never taken, or are delayed, we lose expertise, agency, and the capacity to renew society.
Operating models like the AI Summer Program help transfer students’ skills more quickly to, for example, the benefit of the public sector. The public sector can offer young people meaningful challenges, genuine customer environments, and pathways into working life.
The program also revealed something essential about the role of Aalto University and higher education institutions more broadly. As AI and low-code platforms democratize the building of solutions, innovation and design processes are changing. That is why the education sector needs to update its understanding of what future experts need to know: how to scope a problem, understand users, use AI responsibly, build experimentally, and operate in complex environments.
In this program, research played an important role precisely because it helps us understand how design thinking, software development, and learning are changing in the age of AI. Leading universities, too, need to find new operating models faster, so that education doesn’t just follow the changes in working life, but helps shape them.
The program reinforced the view that the public sector’s renewal requires companies’ solutions, technology, and their ability to bring new tools into use quickly. Tools like Lovable show how ideas can be turned quickly into testable services. At the same time, the public sector can be a platform for growth and innovation for companies — an environment where solutions develop to meet societally significant needs.
The public sector must renew itself in order to respond to growing productivity pressures and future needs. This also requires new perspectives from outside its current structures. Students are a tremendous resource here.
Young experts should therefore not be seen merely as the workforce of the future, but as today’s renewers. Finland’s capacity to renew itself depends on how well we can put this pool of expertise to use in society.
The technological shift opens up a path from small improvements toward more radical renewal. A single experiment can be the start of broader change, if its lessons also challenge established ways of working, structures, and forms of collaboration.
Sitra will carry the AI Summer Program’s operating model and the lessons learned from it forward into new projects together with various partners. In this way, young people’s skills, the public sector’s challenges, and the AI ecosystem can together strengthen Finland’s capacity to renew itself.
Read more about the program’s lessons in the playbook produced by Aalto University (in English).