EU regulation plays a vital role in ensuring safety, trust and fair competition. But identifying, interpreting and complying with regulatory requirements can be difficult and resource-intensive, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises and for public authorities operating across borders.

To address this challenge, Sitra is leading the 2-year OIVA (Open Innovation for Verified Automation) project, which is developing scalable solutions for businesses and public authorities to handle EU regulatory requirements more efficiently. Co-funded under the Digital Europe Programme, the project brings together 20 partners from 6 European countries to ease compliance through digital solutions, AI, automation and trusted data sharing.

Advancing the EU’s digital and competitiveness goals

The project feeds directly into the European Commission priority to simplify regulation and ease compliance. At a time when businesses need to innovate and compete globally, and public authorities are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, digital solutions for regulatory compliance are becoming increasingly important.

By developing trusted, interoperable solutions based on European digital infrastructure, OIVA also supports Europe’s digital sovereignty and helps create the conditions for a more integrated and efficient Digital Single Market.

“At Sitra, we believe that Europe’s most complex challenges are best solved through collaboration. We’re excited to bring together a large consortium with complementary expertise to turn Europe’s vision of a more interoperable and efficient regulatory environment a reality”, says Tiina Vainio, Project Lead for OIVA and Senior Lead at Sitra.

From policy ambition to practical solutions

OIVA aims to turn these ambitions into practical solutions through real-world use cases and cooperation between public authorities, companies and research organisations. The project focuses on creating a technical foundation with digital solutions that are tested in three real-world pilots in vehicle recycling, the built environment and financial reporting.

The aim is to create a trustworthy European digital infrastructure for automated compliance. One part of it introduced in the project is EurLexGPT, an open source, specialised AI language model developed by Sitra to help organisations interpret and apply EU legislation. Developed with European digital sovereignty and EU digital safeguards in mind, EurLexGPT will offer an open-source public good for Europe to make sense of EU law and streamline compliance.

Impact beyond the project

Project results will go beyond the duration of the project and produce scalable solutions that can be reused and adopted across sectors and countries. Key results of the project will be published as open source to support the wider adoption of digital compliance technologies in Europe.

In addition, OIVA will also establish a Community of Practice for Automated Regulatory Compliance, enabling stakeholders across sectors and countries to exchange knowledge and continue developing the field beyond the project’s duration. Interested parties can already sign up to participate.

The OIVA project is a part of Sitra’s international programmes. They involve addressing global and European challenges together with partners to accelerate growth and well-being.