Sitra grants €600,000 for automation and AI agents in small municipalities’ administrative work
The funding will accelerate the automation of municipalities’ administrative routine work and introduce AI agents to support employees. The project partner is the Finnish business technology company Sofigate.
Sitra has granted €600,000 in funding to The More with Less project, a joint project of Finnish small and medium-sized municipalities. The funding will be used to automate administrative routine tasks in municipalities and to pilot the use of AI agents to support work already during 2026.
The project, launched in November 2025, involves Konnevesi, Keuruu, Kittilä, Leppävirta, Puolanka, Sievi, Toivakka, Uurainen and Reisjärvi. The solution model for the project is being designed and implemented by the municipality of Konnevesi and the business technology company Sofigate.
The funding is hugely significant for the municipalities involved, and in time its outcomes will benefit the whole Finnish municipal sector, says Sami von Wehrt of Sofigate, who leads the project.
“We are developing a model that can reduce the working time spent on routine tasks by as much as 85 per cent – at a time when municipalities are under significant cost pressure and a large share of the workforce is approaching retirement in the coming years. On a national scale, the savings potential amounts to tens of millions of euros over the next ten years.”
Municipalities to become pioneers in leveraging AI and data
The funding granted by Sitra runs until the end of 2027. It is part of the Public Sector Productivity Programme, which supports central government, municipalities and wellbeing services counties in becoming pioneers in productivity and the use of technology.
The aim is to accelerate the public sector’s productivity leap with solutions that deliver demonstrable benefits and are widely adopted.
“The More with Less project is a prime example of the kind of reforms we want to support through Sitra’s programme work. It combines a shared municipal model that has already proven effective in the pilot phase, the controlled use of data and AI, and a clear goal of freeing up working time for more impactful work and better services,” says Tommi Vihervaara, Senior Lead, Programmes at Sitra, who is responsible for the project funding.
Of the funding, around €400,000 will cover municipalities’ participation costs and expenses related to project implementation. Around €200,000 will be allocated to the deployment of AI agents and to building an agent library and a model that can be replicated across municipalities.
The project applies the Business Technology Forum’s Business Technology Standard to the planning, implementation and use of municipalities’ IT and AI solutions. The technical solution is based on the Salesforce Public Sector platform, which is designed for the needs of public sector organisations, and Greenstep’s Bezala system is used for matters related to payments.
Smoother work, more attractive municipality
The project is set against a wider transformation in the municipal sector: service needs are growing while labour and resources are declining. According to Keva’s retirement forecast, almost one in three employees in the local government sector will retire over the next ten years (Keva news article in Finnish).
“In municipalities’ day-to-day work, a surprisingly large number of administrative tasks are still carried out manually, and information is often scattered across different systems. This shows up as delays, errors, a growing workload and rising costs. With a shared operating model and AI agents, municipalities can quite simply do more with less. At the same time, municipalities become an attractive workplace for the educated young people of the future as well,” says Mika Pasanen, Mayor of Konnevesi.
Evidence of the model’s effectiveness was already demonstrated in the pilot carried out in Konnevesi in 2025: the digitalisation and automation of applications, processing and payments for private road grants delivered an 85 per cent time saving, reduced processing times from about a week to less than a day, and significantly reduced errors.
“The idea is to expand the model to as many as one hundred municipalities and to larger cities as well,” Pasanen says.
More information:
Sami von Wehrt, Senior Executive, Sofigate
sami.wehrt@sofigate.com
tel. +358 40 551 8146
Tommi Vihervaara, Senior Lead, Public Sector Productivity Programme, Sitra
tommi.vihervaara@sitra.fi
tel. +358 294 618 252
Mika Pasanen, Mayor, Konnevesi
mika.pasanen@konnevesi.fi
tel. +358 400 626 991
Media contact:
Anna de Torres
Chief Marketing Officer, Sofigate
+358 50 5766015
anna.de.torres@sofigate.com
Sofigate is the leading business technology company in the Nordics. We are pioneers in enterprise-level AI services, combining our unique expertise in business transformation, AI agents and leading technology platforms such as ServiceNow and Salesforce. We are the founder of the Business Technology Forum and the developer of the globally used Business Technology Standard, BTS. Our team of over 800 experienced professionals supports customers across six countries and nine offices in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Hungary and Poland. Sofigate’s net sales amount to EUR 150 million, and the company is primarily owned by its management and employees. More information: sofigate.com
Sofigate’s sustainability work advanced significantly in 2025: AI became part of everyday work and customer satisfaction reached a world-class level
Sofigate recruits a team to radically harness AI – Aleksi Halttunen appointed to lead the Disruptive AI business unit
