Finland’s Foreign Ministry pilots AI assistant UMAI for restricted-use information as test for common state AI platform
UMAI can handle personal data and class IV information, the lowest of four security classes. Early pilot tasks include human rights complaints, migration guidance, translation and administrative review requests.
Martti Asikainen | 13.10.2026 | Photo by Adobe Stock Photos
Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs has introduced an AI assistant called UMAI to its first groups of pilot users, the ministry said on 13 October. The service lets staff use AI on non-disclosable personal data and on information at national security classification level IV, in a secure environment.
The ministry already uses AI for information retrieval and for drafting and analysing text. But those tools often can’t handle all the information that daily work requires. UMAI is meant to remove that limit. Level IV is the lowest of four classes in Finland’s government decree on classifying documents, and its documents are marked “restricted use”. The release does not mention classes III to I.
In future, the ministry says, AI could help with reporting from Finland’s missions abroad, situation analyses and handling information on international political and economic relations.
First users and first tasks
The ministry’s Permanent State Secretary, Tuomas Tapio, is among the first users. He uses AI every day, he said, and sees it freeing time “for tasks that require human expertise and judgement”.
The units in the pilot are testing a general-purpose chat assistant and assistants tailored to their own processes. UMAI is helping prepare matters related to human rights complaints. It is also being tested as a search tool for migration guidance materials, as a translation aid and as a tool for processing requests for administrative review. The aim is to speed up information retrieval and make migration-related matters easier to handle.
The ministry developed UMAI with the Government ICT Centre Valtori and its partner CGI. The ministry is also a pilot organisation for a common AI platform for central government. The project has drawn interest across central government and from international partners, the ministry says.
In June, the Finance Ministry gave Valtori €3 million from its €10 million AI investment programme to build the common platform. The ministry doesn’t say whether UMAI is the platform’s first deployment.
Mika Pihlasvaara, an ICT architect in the ministry’s Information and Documentation Unit and widely known as the “father” of UMAI, said progress towards operational deployment shows the solution has reached “the necessary level of maturity”. Its expertise, he said, will benefit central government well beyond the foreign service.
On European terms
The ministry presents UMAI as a test of digital sovereignty. It says the pilot shows that public authorities can keep control over data processing, technology and practices when they use AI.
Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen made the same point. “In the age of AI, Europe must retain its ability to make its own choices,” she said. She called UMAI “a concrete example” of putting that aim into practice in Finnish central government, with Europe able to assess and use AI “on European terms”.
The ministry names Valtori and CGI as development partners. It does not say which AI model UMAI uses, where the system is hosted, or how many people are in the pilot. It also gives no cost and no length for the pilot. Several pilot tasks involve complaints and migration matters, but the ministry does not describe how UMAI’s output is checked before it is used. The comments from Valtonen, Tapio and Pihlasvaara all come from the ministry itself.
