First Moves: A Finland-Specific Assessment of Agentic AI Potential
Where should governments get started with agentic AI? Without a systematic view of where it fits, valuable applications go unexplored while deployments proceed into work that is unsuited or environments that are unready.
First Moves answers that question for Finland. It applies the 70-function government taxonomy set out in Making Agentic AI Work for Government across 69 central-government entities, all 21 wellbeing services counties and the 19 regional capital municipalities. Six scoring dimensions cover capability, impact, productivity measurability and technical, organisational and legal readiness, grounded in more than 23,000 verified function mappings from public bodies’ own documents.
In central government, the assessment identifies:
- 14 priority functions, concentrated in the financial backbone, the citizen-facing front line and enterprise support.
- 16 constrained functions, where the work is agentifiable and measurable but deployment is blocked. None is held back by technology alone.
- 6 functions that should remain human-led, because their core is negotiating between conflicting interests and carrying accountability for contested decisions.
Beyond central government, the assessment covers wellbeing services counties (HVAs) and regional capital municipalities. The counties, established in 2023, are still consolidating inherited IT systems and standardising workflows. Across counties and municipalities, fragmented systems make shared digital services an important condition for wider deployment.
The report also explores how Finland could help shape a European approach to these functions, through shared standards for digital identity, delegated authority and cross-border evidence exchange.
Explore all 70 functions, their scores, reasoning and underlying evidence in the interactive dashboard. Read Sitra’s accompanying working paper, The next right questions on the path to the Agentic State.
And get in touch with us, we want to hear what you think!